BV  210  .M29  1922 
Mahoney,  Carl  K. 
The  philosophy  of  prayer 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

SOCIAL  EVOLUTION  AND  THE  DEVELOP- 
MENT OF  RELIGION 


The  Philosophy 
of  Prayer 


C.  K.  MAHONEY 


THE   ABINGDON   PRESS 

NEW  YORK  CINCINNATI 


Copyright,  1922,  by 
C.  K.  MAHONEY 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


To  MY  CONGREGATION, 

LOYAL  AND  BELOVED, 

AT 

FIRST  METHODIST  CHURCH, 

TERRE  HAUTE,  INDIANA 


CONTENTS 

Chapteb  I.    Introduction 

PAGE 

Superficiality  and  emotionalism — The  lack  of  scientific 
method — The  need  of  the  ordinary  man — Prayer  the 
essence  of  religion — The  naturalness  of  prayer — The 
importance  of  a  scientific  study  of  prayer 13 

PART  I 
PRAYER  AS  A  PSYCHOLOGICAL  FACT 
Chapter  II.     The  Meaning  of  Prayer 
Definition     and     definitions  —  Subconscious     Prayer — 
Prayer    and   sacrifice — The    two   ideas   of   sacrifice — 
Magic  and  prayer — Prayer  and  mysticism 25 

Chapter  III.     Prater  in  its  Highest  Development 
The  "Lord's  Prayer"  as  a  model — The  social  nature  of 
prayer — The  Fatherhood  of  God — Prayer  and  praise 
— Petitions  for  material  needs — The  moral  element  in 
prayer — Humility 50 

Chapter  IV.     The  Subjective  Effects  of  Prater 
The  value  of  prayer  recognized  by  an  atheist — The  soul 
unifying   effect   of   prayer — A   generator   of  faith — A 
dynamic  of  religious  labor — A  transformer  of  life  and 
character 66 

PART  II 
PRAYER  AS  A  COSMIC  FACT 
Chapter  V.    Prater  and  the  World  Order 
Every  man's  need  of  a  philosophy — The  problems  of 
prayer — The  world  ground — Mechanism — Teleology — 
Organic    causation — Prayer    and    law — The    laws    of 
prayer 79 


8  CONTENTS 

Chapter  VI.     The  God  of  Prater 

FAQB 

The  tragedy  of  the  loss  of  God — Causes  of  this  condition 
— Historic  conceptions  of  God  and  their  influence — 
Deism — Pantheism — Absolutism — Modern  Philosophy 
— The  kind  of  God  the  world  needs — Evolutionary 
philosophy  discovers  God — The  idea  of  God  not  out- 
worn— The  God  of  the  Bible — Personality — Prayer 
lifted  into  a  cosmic  significance 96 

Selected  Bibliography 121 

Index 123 


PREFACE 

Philosophy  undertakes  to  explain  the 
facts  of  existence.  Those  facts  are  the 
facts  of  experience,  in  the  widest  sense  of 
the  term,  and  the  facts  of  necessary  infer- 
ence deduced  from  the  premises  furnished 
by  experience.  Prayer  is  a  real  fact  of 
human  life.  It  ought  to  have  a  philosophy. 
It  is  the  effort  of  the  following  pages  to 
enter  a  little  way  into  that  philosophy.. 

The  author  recognizes  the  handicap  of 
comparative  loneliness  in  this  field  of  study. 
He  also  recognizes  the  limitations  of  his  own 
contribution.  If  it  should  do  no  more  than 
prove  an  incentive  to  some  abler  writer  to 
do  better,  it  has  been  worth  while.  The 
subject  is  in  sore  need  of  critical  study. 

Terre  Haute,  Indiana, 
January,  1922. 


INTRODUCTION 


CHAPTER  I 
INTRODUCTION 

Superficiality  and  Emotionalism 

A  RECENT  writer  on  the  subject  of  prayer 
has  deplored  the  superficiaUty  and  over- 
abundance of  emotionahsm  on  the  part  of 
most  books  of  a  devotional  character.  Ac- 
cording to  this  author,  there  is  a  manifest 
lack  of  intellectual  thoroughness  and  a  close 
approach  to  sentimentality  in  many  of  the 
books  written  about  prayer  and  the  devo- 
tional life.  One  might  pertly  ask  this  writer 
whether  he  expects  to  rescue  this  depart- 
ment of  religious  literature  from  the  mire 
into  which  he  says  it  has  fallen;  but  one 
cannot  get  away  from  the  conviction  that 
the  man  is  telling  the  truth,  no  matter  what 
he  may  have  done  or  not  done  for  the  sub- 
ject of  prayer.  There  has  been  a  proneness 
to  take  things  for  granted,  to  go  on  assump- 
tions without  backing  up  those  assumptions 
with  proof  or  reasonable  argument. 

13 


14    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

Lack  of  Scientific  Method 

This  class  of  writings,  with  few  excep- 
tions,   is    singularly    lacking    in    scientific 
method.   The  approach  to  its  themes  is  not 
the  intellectual  approach.     It  is  more  the 
poetic  method  of  drifting  into  things  by  way 
of  meditation.    It  may  be  contended  that 
the    cold-blooded     scrutiny     of     scientific 
method  or  the  apparently  colorless  treat- 
ment of  philosophical  reasoning  is  out  of 
place  in  a  consideration  of  the  subject  of 
prayer.   Prayer  is  a  matter  of  the  heart.   It 
lies  in  the  realm  of  feeling,  of  mysticism,  of 
intuition.    But  just  so  long  as  such  an  atti- 
tude is  taken  just  so  long  must  the  general 
thought  of  prayer  remain  vague  and  con- 
fused.  What  is  the  reason  for  this  assump- 
tion?   May  not  prayer  submit  to  analysis 
and  still  retain  its  mysticism,  its  emotional 
content,  its  intuitional  aspect,  if  these  can 
be  shown  to  be  in  accord  with  reality?  Our 
devotional    attitude    will   lose   nothing   in 
fervency  or  in  sincerity  by  clarifying  the 
meaning  of  prayer.  Anything  that  can  throw 
light  on  matters  of  spiritual  life  is  of  service 
to  religion.   Anything  that  will  help  us  to  a 
better  understanding  of  what  we  are  doing, 


INTRODUCTION  15 

or  may  do,  or  should  do,  when  we  pray, 
will  make  our  worship  more  worthy,  more 
rational,  and  more  profound.  We  should 
not  be  afraid  of  the  question  mark  in 
matters  of  sacred  concern.  The  man  was 
quite  right  who  said  that  the  man  who 
invented  the  question  mark  was  inspired 
of  God,  inasmuch  as  the  question  is  the 
hook  by  which  we  reach  upward  and  pull 
ourselves  upward  to  realms  of  higher  truth 
and  reach  outward  and  pull  ourselves  from 
our  narrow  and  circumscribed  position  into 
wider  areas  of  knowledge.  When  we  have 
made  every  possible  inquiry  about  prayer 
and  have  learned  about  it  all  we  may, 
there  will  still  be  left  an  immeasurable 
vastness  of  mystery  and  profundity. 

The  Need  of  the  Ordinary  Man 

The  poetic  soul  may  be  satisfied  to  go  on 
exercising  his  emotions  and,  by  impulse  or 
inspiration,  climb  continually  into  higher 
realms  of  experience  and  vision.  But  the 
hard-headed,  everyday  citizen  must  have  a 
reason  for  the  faith  that  is  within  him.  He 
is  practical  in  his  needs  and  his  uses  of 
things.     He  must  know  something  of  the 


16    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

whyness  and  wherefore.  Prayer  has  been 
lost  out  of  the  Uf e  of  many  a  matter-of-fact 
man  or  woman  because  it  has  failed  to  re- 
main among  the  substantial  realities.  The 
matter-of-fact  man  is  daily  face  to  face  with 
a  world  of  laws  and  principles  and  things 
that  are  rationally  connected.  He  has  lost 
prayer  out  of  his  line  of  cause  and  eflFect. 
He  has  ceased  to  include  it  among  the  essen- 
tial realities.  Before  prayer  can  ever  become 
a  vital  and  real  thing  for  him,  he  must  get  it 
back  into  his  universe  of  necessities^  He 
must  find  a  place  for  it  in  a  rational  world 
order.  He  must  come  to  a  clearer  under- 
standing of  its  nature  and  place  of  impor- 
tance. He  must  get  some  sort  of  a  philoso- 
phy of  prayer.  Oh,  I  know  that  in  times  of 
stress  and  in  moments  of  emergency  he  will 
pray  naturally  and  instinctively,  but  I  am 
speaking  of  prayer  becoming  a  part  of  his 
program  of  life  practice. 

Prayer  the  Essence  of  Religion 

Prayer  is  the  very  heart  of  religion. 
Prayer  is  the  essence  of  worship.  Religion 
includes  belief  and  practice  and  principle 
and  institution,  but  all  these  draw  their 


INTRODUCTION  17 

vitality  from  worship.  A  religion  without 
worship  is  not  a  religion  at  all.  R.  R.  Mar- 
rett  says  in  his  article  on  prayer  in  the 
EnqjclopwdiakBritannica  that  prayer  is  "a 
characteristic  feature  of  the  higher  religions, 
and  we  might  say  that  Christianity  or 
Mohammedanism,  ritually  viewed,  is  in  its 
inmost  essence  a  service  of  prayer."  He 
further  says,  ''At  all  stages  of  rehgious  de- 
velopment, and  more  especially  in  the  cases 
of  more  primitive  forms  of  cult,  prayer 
occurs  together  with  and  shades  off  into 
other  varieties  of  observance  that  bear 
obvious  marks  of  belonging  to  the  same 
family."  This  is  another  way  of  saying  that 
the  other  practices  of  primitive  religion  par- 
take of  the  nature  of  prayer.  Professor 
George  A.  Coe,  in  his  Psychology  of  Religion,^ 
says  concerning  prayer,  "A  history  and 
psychology  of  prayer  would  almost  be  a 
history  and  psychology  of  religion."  Dr. 
George  Galloway  says  in  his  Philosophy  of 
Religion,^  "Prayer  is  one  of  those  religious 
acts  which  are  practiced  wherever  religion 
exists."   Professor  William  James  says  that 

*  University  of  Chicago  Press,  publishers. 
2  Charles  Scribner's  Sons,  publishers. 


18    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

prayer  in  its  widest  sense  is  the  soul  and 
essence  of  religion.  By  its  "widest  sense"  he 
says  that  he  means  every  kind  of  inward 
communion  or  conversation  with  the  power 
regarded  as  divine,  and  he  also  says  that  the 
genuineness  of  religion  is  indissolubly  bound 
up  with  the  question  whether  the  prayerful 
consciousness  be  or  be  not  deceitful.  Dr. 
Edward  Scribner  Ames  is  about  the  only 
dissenter  from  the  general  view  of  the  ex- 
treme importance  of  prayer  to  religion  that 
I  have  discovered  among  the  thinkers  in 
either  the  field  of  the  psychology  of  religion 
or  the  philosophy  of  religion.  He  claims  that 
prayer  occupied  a  secondary  and  relatively 
subordinate  place  in  primitive  religion  and 
that  in  more  advanced  religions  prayer  still 
occupies  a  relatively  secondary  and  subor- 
dinate place.  {Psychology  of  Religious  Expe- 
rience ^  "Prayer.")  But  he  reaches  these 
conclusions  by  greatly  narrowing  his  defini- 
tion of  prayer,  and,  even  on  that  basis,  his 
conclusions  do  not  seem  to  be  warranted 
either  by  facts  or  strength  of  argument. 

The  Naturalness  of  Prayer 

Prayer  is  a  natural  and  universal  thing. 


INTRODUCTION  19 

In  spite  of  the  reasons  why  we  should  pray 
or  should  not  pray,  the  fact  remains  that  we 
do  pray.  And,  as  Professor  James  has  said, 
"The  reason  why  we  do  pray  is  that  we  can- 
not help  praying."  "The  culture  of  prayer," 
says  Dr.  Fosdick,  "therefore,  is  not  import- 
ing an  alien,  but  is  training  a  native  citizen 
of  the  soul."^  Prayer  was  a  matter  of  the 
most  primitive  worship.  Men  in  all  ages  and 
in  all  lands,  since  the  beginning  of  religion, 
have  been  engaged  in  the  practice  of  prayer. 
Man  has  never  outgrown  it  and  never  will 
outgrow  it.  Prayer  belongs  to  all  religions, 
primitive  or  advanced. 

Since  prayer  is  so  important  for  religion, 
and  a  prayer  life  is  so  surely  involved  in  the 
exercise  of  religion,  and  since  a  philosophy 
concerning  the  most  important  facts  and  re- 
lations of  life  is  inevitable,  it  is  diflScult  to 
understand  why  thinkers  in  the  field  of 
religion  have  not  gone  into  the  subject  more 
thoroughly  and  critically.  If  there  is  one 
single  needed  service  outstanding  for  reli- 
gious reflection  to  perform,  it  is  the  proper 
orientation  of  prayer.    Next  in  importance 

^  Taken  from  The  Meaning  of  Prayer,  p.  17,  by  H.  E. 
Fosdick.      Association  Press,  New  York. 


20     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

l^  to  Si  discovery  of  God  is  to  get  on  a  plane  of 
fellowship  and  communion  with  him.  When 
man  comes  upon  the  fact  of  the  existence  of 
a  higher  order  of  reality  than  that  imme- 
diately apparent  in  the  matter-of-fact  world 
about  him,  he  does  two  things.  He  seeks  to 
define  and  explain  that  new  order  of  reality 
and  he  seeks  to  bring  himself  into  living 
relation  with  it.  The  former  is  philosophy 
and  the  latter  is  religion.  The  most  direct 
approach  to  an  established  relationship  with 
that  higher  order  of  reality  is  by  the  method 
of  prayer.  It  lies  at  the  very  basis  of  the 
religious  attitude.  When  we  deal  with 
prayer,  its  meaning,  its  history,  its  laws,  its 
correlary  assumptions,  we  are  in  the  realm 
of  the  fundamentals. 

Professor  Jevons  has  shown  how  impor- 
tant it  is  for  the  missionary  to  be  prepared 
to  deal  with  the  subject  of  prayer.  He  will 
find  the  heathen  addicted  to  the  habit  of 
prayer.  It  is  his  business  to  teach  them  to 
whom  to  pray,  how  to  pray,  and  what  to 
pray  for.  He  will  not  find  them  all  sim- 
pletons. He  must  show  a  knowledge  of  this 
deepest  thing  in  religion  that  will  command 
their  respect.    "The  applied  science  of  reli- 


INTRODUCTION  21 

gion  should  equip  him  in  this  respect.  It 
should  be  able  to  take  the  facts  and  truths 
established  by  the  science  of  religion  and 
apply  them  to  the  purposes  of  the  mission- 
ary. But  it  is  a  striking  example  of  the  youth 
and  immaturity  of  the  science  of  religion 
that  no  attempt  has  yet  been  made  by  it  to 
collect  the  facts,  much  less  to  coordinate 
and  state  them  scientifically."^ 

The  Importance  of  a  Scientific  Study 
OF  Prayer 

If  this  equipment  is  important  for  the 
missionary,  it  is  also  important  for  the 
preacher  and  pastor  on  the  home  field. 
Preachers  complain  of  the  lack  of  prayer  in 
the  homes  of  their  people.  In  many  cases, 
even  while  they  are  complaining  of  others, 
they  are  not  extremely  prayerful  them- 
selves. They  have  not  realized  the  impor- 
tance of  prayer  and  the  possibilities  of 
prayer  and  have  not  been  prepared  to  give 
their  people  instruction  in  the  important  and 
profound  things  that  belong  to  the  subject. 

1  Reprinted,  by  permission  of  the  Macmillan  Company, 
from  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Comparative  Religion,  p.  140, 
by  F.  B.  Jevons,  copyright,  1908,  by  the  Macmillan  Company. 


22     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

Many  prayers  before  the  congregation  are 
formal  and  perfunctory.  They  fail  to  excite 
interest,  to  find  a  hearing,  to  lead  the  con- 
gregation into  the  spirit  of  worship.  If  a 
proportionate  amount  of  time  in  relation  to 
the  time  given  to  the  preparation  of  the 
sermon  were  given  to  the  preparation  of  the 
prayer,  it  would  be  a  different  matter.  The 
people  ought  to  be  given  instruction  in 
prayer.  The  disciples  of  our  Lord  felt  the 
need  of  it.  The  Christian  Church  has  not 
outgrown  this  need.  But  that  which  has 
been  so  obviously  essential  to  the  devotional 
life  has  been  taken  so  much  for  granted  and 
regarded  as  so  simple  and  familiar  that  it 
has  become  a  neglected  subject  for  study. 
Dr.  Fosdick  says:  'Tf  there  is  any  element 
in  human  life  to  whose  inestimable  value  we 
have  abundant  testimony,  it  is  prayer;  and 
to  leave  misunderstood  and  untrained  a 
power  capable  of  such  high  uses  is  a  spiritual 
tragedy."^ 

1  Meaning  of  Prayer,  p.  17.      Association  Press,  New  York. 


PART  I 

PRAYER  AS  A  PSYCHOLOGICAL 
FACT 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  MEANING  OF  PRAYER 

Definition  and  Definitions 

Recently  I  came  upon  the  statement 
that  prayer  could  not  be  defined.  Then  the 
writer  of  that  statement  proceeded  to  define 
prayer,  and  did  it  very  well,  did  it  so  well 
that  there  was  little  room  for  doubt  in  the 
matter.  The  fashion  of  stating  grandilo- 
quently that  a  thing  is  too  big  for  definition 
is  a  fault  that  has  crept  into  the  thought  of 
many  men  who  are  really  clear  thinkers.  It 
is  a  sort  of  confession  of  humility  in  the 
presence  of  great  truths,  but  often  in  rela- 
tion to  the  discussion  which  follows  it  is 
scarcely  more  than  a  rhetorical  flourish. 
When  it  is  followed  up  by  a  definition  of  the 
thing  declared  to  be  indefinable,  it  is  clearly 
an  absurdity.  Dr.  Olin  A.  Curtis  used  to  say 
that  entirely  too  much  is  made  of  the  mys- 
teries of  the  Bible.  He  indicated  that 
mysteries  are  often  found  when  no  mystery 
was  intended.  The  Scripture  is  a  revelation. 
It  was  not  written  for  inspiring  awe  but  for 
25 


26     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

revealing  truth.  This  does  not  mean  that 
the  Bible  is  sun-clear,  or  that  it  is  a  book  for 
simpletons,  or  that  the  task  of  interpreta- 
tion is  a  light  and  superficial  task  that  any- 
one, however  inexpert  he  may  be,  may 
undertake  with  the  confidence  that  he  may 
successfully  unfold  all  its  truth  or  may  in 
no  sense  misunderstand  its  meaning.  It 
does  mean  that  the  Bible  is  an  intelligible 
book,  and  that  the  whole  of  it  was  given  for 
understanding  rather  than  for  confusing  and 
staggering  the  mind  with  mystery. 

To  define  a  thing  does  not  mean  to  ex- 
haust its  meaning.  It  means  to  so  state  its 
essentials  and  so  differentiate  it  from  other 
things  that  it  may  be  clearly  recognized. 
Definition  is  a  matter  of  distinction.  With 
the  meaning  of  definition  held  clearly  in 
mind,  it  will  be  difficult  to  assert  that  any- 
thing is  too  big  for  definition.  In  fact,  it  is 
not  the  vast  and  profound  thing  that  is  so 
difficult  of  definition  but  the  comparatively 
simple  and  familiar  thing. 

On  the  other  hand,  I  do  not  wish  to  be 
understood  as  taking  the  ground  that  prayer 
is  a  simple  and  obvious  thing.  One  of  the 
reasons  given  by  Professor  Tylor  for  the 


THE  MEANING  OF  PRAYER     27 

fact  that  no  more  attention  has  been  paid  by 
scholars  in  the  study  of  rehgion  to  the  sub- 
ject of  prayer  is  that  "so  simple  and  familiar 
is  the  nature  of  prayer  that  its  study  does 
not  demand  the  detail  of  fact  and  argument 
which  must  be  given  to  rites  in  comparison 
practically  insignificant"  (Primitive  Cul- 
ture, 11,  364).  Professor  Jevons  very  per- 
tinently remarks  in  a  criticism  of  this  pas- 
sage that  familiar  things  are  often  assumed 
to  be  simple  when  a  more  thorough  exam- 
ination of  them  will  reveal  that  they  are  not 
so  simple,  after  all.^  It  is  well  to  avoid  any 
sort  of  extreme  or  extravagant  statement  in 
any  connection. 

In  defining  a  thing  it  is  necessary  to  be 
careful  that  all  of  it  shall  be  included,  that 
no  essential  shall  be  left  out,  and  that 
nothing  shall  be  included  which  does  not 
belong.  Professor  James  is  wise  and  correct 
when  he  insists  on  considering  prayer  in  the 
widest  sense.  No  other  consideration  is  fair 
and  right. 

Dr.  R.  R.  Marrett  in  his  article  on  prayer 
in    the    Encyclopcedia    Britannica    defines 

^  Introduction  to  Study  of  Comparative  Religion.     Macmillan 
Co.,  New  York. 


28     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

prayer  as  "a  term  used  generally  for  any 
humble  petition,  but  more  technically  in 
religion,  for  that  mode  of  addressing  a 
divine  or  sacred  power  in  which  there  pre- 
dominates the  mood  and  intention  of  rev- 
erent entreaty."  Dr.  Charles  L.  Slattery 
defines  prayer  as  talking  with  the  Unseen, 
whether  the  Unseen  be  conceived  of  as  a 
personal  God  or  as  a  vague  something  out- 
side of  oneself.^  Professor  James  defines 
prayer  as  "every  kind  of  inward  communion 
or  conversation  with  the  power  recognized 
as  divine."^ 

All  these  definitions  are  good,  and  in  a 
general  way  rather  clearly  state  for  any  of 
us  what  we  mean  by  prayer,  wherever  we 
find  the  practice  and  with  all  its  various 
phases  and  modifications.  The  definition  of 
Dr.  Marrett,  scholarly  and  thorough  as  it  is, 
may  convey  an  overemphasis  of  the  idea  of 
petition  and  entreaty.  I  think  that  prayer 
is  primarily  an  expression  of  desire  and  I 
believe  with  Professor  Hoffding  that,  in  the 
lowest  form  in  which  it  may  manifest  itself. 


1  Why  Men  Pray,  p.  5.  Macmillan  Company,  New  York. 

2  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  p.  464.    Longmans,  Green 
&  Co.,  New  York. 


THE  MEANING  OF  PRAYER     29 

"religion  appears  under  the  guise  of  desire"; 
but  an  overemphasis  of  the  idea  of  entreaty 
may  obscure  the  ideas  of  communion  and 
contemplation,  worship  and  resignation,  as 
found  in  the  higher  exercises  of  prayer.  The 
whole  matter  is  evidently  perfectly  clear  in 
the  mind  of  the  author,  but  it  might  not  be 
so  to  the  mind  of  one  who  had  not  thought 
the  subject  through  quite  so  thoroughly. 
And  one  of  the  sources  of  value  of  our  defini- 
tions is  the  use  that  other  people  can  make 
of  them. 

Dr.  Slattery's  definition  seems  to  say  that 
language  expression  is  necessary  to  prayer. 
If  his  definition  should  be  accepted,  he 
would  have  to  furnish  a  definition  of  talking 
as  used  in  this  connection.  Otherwise,  it  is 
too  narrow.  There  are  prayers  in  which 
there  is  no  language  expression,  not  even 
word  images.  The  desires  are  inarticulate 
and  simply  mean  a  sort  of  yearning  after  the 
Divine  Presence.  It  is  evident  from  what 
Dr.  Slattery  further  says  on  the  subject  of 
prayer  that  he  would  not  limit  it  to  lan- 
guage expression,  but  we  do  not  gather  this 
from  his  definition  taken  by  itself. 

The  definition  by  Professor  James  com- 


30    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

pletely  covers  the  case.  It  is  neither  too 
wide  nor  too  narrow.  Prayer  is  any  sort  of 
inner  communion  or  conversation  with  the 
Power  regarded  as  divine.  The  first  part  of 
the  definition  covers  every  kind  of  prayer 
attitude  from  the  most  primitive  to  the 
most  advanced  and  from  the  simplest  out- 
flow of  rehgious  desire  to  the  most  elaborate 
form  of  prayer  expression.  If  it  should  be 
objected  that  the  latter  part  of  this  defini- 
tion assumes  an  attitude  entirely  too  intel- 
lectual for  primitive  prayer,  the  answer  may 
be  given  that,  while  the  objective  of  the 
prayers  of  primitive  man  did  not  have  the 
content  of  what  the  more  advanced  religious 
consciousness  labeled  "divinity,"  it  had  all 
the  potentialities  of  the  higher  conception 
and  stood  in  the  same  relation  to  his  prim- 
itive mind  that  the  idea  of  divinity  holds  for 
the  religious  thinker. 

Dr.  Harry  Emerson  Fosdick  says  that 
prayer  may  be  considered  as  dominant  de- 
sire. Professor  Coe  amends  that  statement 
by  saying  that  prayer  may  be  a  way  of 
securing  domination  over  desire.  "It  starts," 
he  says,  "as  the  assertion  of  any  desire;  it 
ends  as  the  organization  of  one's  own  desires 


THE  MEANING  OF  PRAYER    31 

into  a  system  of  desires  recognized  asy 
superior  and  then  made  one's  own."^  But 
Dr.  Fosdick  is  not  contradicted  and  nothing 
is  added  to  the  original  content  of  his  state- 
ment. It  is  simply  expressed  in  greater  de- 
tail. Prayer  is  still  a  matter  of  dominant 
desire,  for  the  desire  to  conform  to  the  will 
of  God  finally  dominates  all  other  desires. 

Subconscious  Prayer 

Dr.  Slattery  expresses  a  belief  in  the  expe- 
rience of  subconscious  prayer.^  He  uses  the 
analogies  of  the  circulation  of  the  blood  and 
the  process  of  breathing  to  illustrate  his 
meaning,  showing  that  they  were  done  un- 
consciously, or  subconsciously,  long  before 
they  were  discovered.  Harvey  discovered 
the  circulation  of  the  blood  in  1616,  but  all 
the  years  before  that  the  heart  had  been 
sending  the  blood  through  the  arteries.  We 
are  not  aware  of  our  breathing  until  there  is 
some  obstruction  or  exertion,  like  climbing 
a  hill.  But  the  breathing  goes  on  whether 
we  are  conscious  of  it  or  not.  As  another 
illustration  he  used  the  case  of  the  use  of 

*  Psychology  of  Religion.  University  of  Chicago  Press. 
2  Why  Men  Pray,  p.  6.     Maemillan  Co.,  New  York. 


32     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

hot  oil  for  the  treatment  of  wounds  in  the 
Franco-Prussian  War.  When  the  medical 
authorities  gave  out  the  opinion  that  there 
was  no  healing  eflScacy  in  oil,  the  practice 
was  stopped.  The  death  rate  became  so 
appalling  that  Pasteur  was  led  to  investigate 
the  matter  and  found  that  the  heat  rather 
than  the  oil  was  the  thing  that  had  aided  in 
the  healing  of  wounds  by  killing  the  germs 
of  infection.  Thus  the  older  medical  practice 
had  been  right  in  its  method  without  under- 
standing what  it  was  doing. 

So,  he  argues,  men  may  pray  from  the 
inner  depths  of  their  being  without  realizing 
that  they  are  praying.  Complaint  of  the 
weather,  of  pain  or  sorrow  must  be  com- 
plaint to  someone  outside  ourselves,  fate  or 
nature,  whatever  or  whoever  is  in  control  of 
the  universe  and  to  which  or  to  whom 
humanity  is  subject.  It  is  complaining  to 
the  Unseen.  And,  on  the  other  hand,  men 
are  engaging  in  unconscious  prayer  when 
they  become  exultant.  He  says  that  Walt 
Whitman  was  subconsciously  praying  when 
he  spoke  of  "caressing  life."  And  subcon- 
scious prayer  is  seen  in  the  general  reverence 
that  men  now  have  for  the  laws  of  nature. 


THE  MEANING  OF  PRAYER     33 

What  is  on  the  surface  a  gross  materiaHsm 
is  underneath  a  way  of  outlet  for  spiritual 
longing.  He  says  that  the  deepest  aspect  of 
"subconscious  prayer"  is  when  one  says, 
"I  ought"  or  "I  ought  not,"  whether  it 
applies  to  acts  of  the  past  or  future.  When 
applied  to  past  acts  this  feeling  of  oughtness 
is  a  subconscious  prayer  of  repentance. 
When  applied  to  the  future  it  is  an  acknowl- 
edgment or  confession  to  the  Unseen  of  the 
realization  of  duty.  So,  according  to  Dr. 
Slattery,  Kant's  Categorical  Imperative  is 
a  matter  of  subconscious  prayer. 

This  line  of  thought  is  extremely  interest- 
ing. Its  chief  value  lies  in  showing  the 
naturalness  of  prayer.  When  Dr.  Slattery 
takes  up  prayer  under  another  head  and 
treats  it  as  instinctive,  he  is  really  saying 
the  same  thing  over  again,  or,  rather,  he  is 
completing  the  thought  concerning  sub- 
conscious prayer.  Of  course  that  which  is 
going  on  within  the  inner  being  is  going  to 
come  out  inevitably  in  a  clearer  and  more 
recognizable  manifestation  of  itself.  It  is 
scarcely  necessary  to  say  that  to  have  moral 
and  spiritual  value  prayer  must  rise  into  the 
realm  of  consciousness,  but  it  is  a  great 


34    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

reenforcement  to  a  cosmic  view  of  religion 
to  realize  that  prayer  has  its  foundation  in 
the  fundamental  structure  of  Ufe  itself  and 
is  not  an  accretion  from  without. 

Prayer  and  Sacrifice 

Prayer  and  sacrifice  have  gone  together 
in  religion  from  the  most  primitive  times. 
If  the  prayers  of  primitive  peoples  have  not 
been  preserved  along  with  the  rites  of 
sacrifice,  it  is  because  of  the  greater  difficulty 
in  their  preservation.  They  most  certainly 
existed.  Religious  worship  may  be  said  to 
have  internal  and  external  aspects.  Prayer 
is  the  internal  aspect,  or  worship  of  the 
mind.  Sacrifice  is  the  external  aspect,  or 
worship  of  action.  Sacrifice  has  very  aptly 
been  called  prayer  in  the  form  of  deeds. 
Prayer  and  sacrifice  have  all  along  had  the 
same  general  motives  and  the  same  sort  of 
objectives.  They  have  the  same  general 
character.  When  prayer  is  expressed  at  all 
it  is  expressed  in  language.  Sacrifice  is  the 
expression  of  the  same  thing  in  action.  The 
underlying  idea  in  each  case  is  that  of 
dominant  desire.  Prayer  may  be  un- 
expressed.    It  may  be  a  matter  of  inner 


THE  MEANING  OF  PRAYER     35 

thought  and  feehng.  As  such  it  can  be 
studied  only  in  our  own  experience.  It  is 
not  a  matter  for  general  or  historic  study. 

The  Two  Ideas  of  Sacrifice 

Sacrifice  has  been  found  to  have  two 
motives.  The  original  religious  attitude  was 
doubtless  one  of  fear  and  the  supernatural 
powers  were  not  regarded  as  friendly.  There- 
fore the  primitive  worshiper  sought  to  ap- 
pease his  god.  The  device  which  he  fell  upon 
for  doing  this  was  the  offering  up  of  some- 
thing that  would  please  his  god  and  turn 
away  his  anger.  The  gods  were  regarded  as 
taking  peculiar  pleasure  in  the  sacrifice  of 
life  and  oftentimes  it  has  been  regarded  as 
necessary  to  offer  human  sacrifices  to  ap- 
pease the  gods.  The  other  motive  has  been 
the  desire  to  come  into  communion  with  the 
god,  to  share  his  power,  to  partake  of  his 
nature.  The  sacrifice  which  was  pleasing  to 
him  was  regarded  as  containing  manna,  a 
sort  of  supernatural  potency  because  of  the 
sacredness  of  the  sacrificial  animal  and  be- 
cause of  its  identification  with  the  god  in 
the  rites  of  sacrifice.  The  desire  to  please  the 
gods  and  to  enter  into  communion  with 


36     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

them  has  not  always  been  unselfish.  The 
primitive  worshiper  sought  to  use  his  god 
to  his  own  advantage,  and  the  modern 
worshiper  has  not  entirely  lost  the  idea. 

In  the  more  advanced  religions  these 
motives  of  sacrifice  have  found  expression  in 
other  directions.  The  desire  to  please  God 
finds  expression  in  a  life  of  service  rather 
^  than  in  the  ceremonial  rites  of  sacrifice. 
Saint  Paul  furnishes  us  with  the  language  of 
the  transition:  'T  beseech  you  therefore, 
brethren,  by  the  mercies  of  God,  that  ye 
present  your  bodies  a  living  sacrifice,  holy, 
acceptable  unto  God,  which  is  your  reason- 
able service."  The  transition  is  seen  in  both 
the  conception  of  God  and  the  idea  of  sac- 
rifice. The  desire  to  come  into  communion 
with  God  finds  its  complete  satisfaction  for 
those  who  are  deeply  spiritual  in  prayer  and 
meditation. 

It  would  not  be  wise  in  this  discussion  to 
pass  over  the  sacrifice  of  Christ  on  the  cross 
without  giving  it  some  consideration.  And 
it  is  significant  that  the  whole  scheme  of 
human  redemption  as  found  in  the  Christian 
religion  is  grounded  in  these  age-long  mo- 
tives in  religious  life  and  practice.     The 


THE  MEANING  OF  PRAYER    37 

Christian  doctrine  of  reconciliation  runs 
parallel  with  the  ancient  idea  of  appeasing 
God  in  sacrifice.  There  has  been  throughout 
the  history  of  religion  a  recognition  of  a 
tension  between  the  human  and  the  divine. 
In  philosophy  there  has  been  the  recognition 
of  this  tension  between  man  and  his  environ- 
ment. In  science  man's  life,  and  all  life,  has 
been  regarded  as  a  process  of  adaptation  to 
environment.  It  is  very  significant  that  all 
three  phases  of  study  should  make  essen- 
tially the  same  discovery.  Now,  Christianity 
brings  forward  the  doctrine  of  the  reconcilia- 
tion in  which  the  tension  between  the 
human  and  the  divine  is  shown  to  be  man's 
sin  and  rebellion  against  God's  moral  gov- 
ernment. Harmony  can  be  effected  only 
through  a  satisfaction  for  sin  that  gives  full 
honor  and  recognition  to  the  sanctity  of  the 
moral  law,  thus  providing  a  way  of  forgive- 
ness for  man,  and  a  plan  of  redemption  that 
is  able  to  bring  man  back  into  harmony 
with  God's  moral  government.  Christ's 
sacrifice  of  himself  on  the  cross,  which  is 
also  God's  sacrifice  of  his  Son,  accomplished 
the  first  part  of  the  requirement.  The  work 
of  his  kingdom  in  the  world  to  win  man  to 


38     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

righteousness  and  to  God  is  destined  to 
accomplish  the  second  part.  The  harmoni- 
ous conclusion  of  rehgion,  philosophy,  and 
science  concerning  the  existing  tension  be- 
tween man  and  his  world  is  indicative  of  the 
fact  that  sin  is  a  cosmic  fact  and  redemption 
a  cosmic  need  in  the  evolution  of  life. 

The  other  idea  of  sacrifice  is  also  dis- 
covered in  the  sacrifice  of  Christ,  the  idea  of 
union  with  divinity.  Christ  in  his  sacrifice 
as  a  Divine  Being  identifies  himself  with  the 
human  race,  uniting  in  his  person  the  human 
and  the  divine,  and  bringing  God  into  direct 
connection  with  man.  Thus  we  find  in  the 
Christian  doctrine  of  the  incarnation  the 
fulfillment,  in  the  strictest  sense  of  the  term, 
of  the  idea  of  the  primitive  man,  that  in 
sacrifice  he  brings  himself  into  union  with 
his  god. 

Magic  and  Prayer 

Much  has  been  written  on  the  relation 
between  magic  and  religion.  The  connection 
seems  to  be  found  in  the  relation  between 
magic  and  prayer.  Magic  is  more  diflScult  to 
define  than  prayer.  The  use  of  the  term  has 
been  more  uncertain  and  confused.  But  cer- 


THE  MEANING  OF  PRAYER    39 

tain  main  ideas  are  clear  and  these  happen 
to  be  the  ideas  that  relate  magic  to  prayer. 

Magic  is  like  prayer  in  that  it  is  the  ex- 
pression of  desire.  It  is  unlike  prayer  in  its 
method.  Dr.  Galloway  states  the  difference. 
The  idea  of  magic  is  control,  while  the  idea 
of  prayer  is  dependence. 

After  the  study  of  the  various  theories 
concerning  prayer  and  magic,  I  have  been 
able  to  reach  some  conclusions  of  my  own. 
Dr.  Eraser,  the  anthropologist,  holds  the 
well-known  theory  that  magic  and  prayer 
are  so  utterly  dissimilar  that  they  never 
could  mix,  and  that  the  failure  of  magic  as 
a  method  of  attainment  of  desired  ends  gave 
rise  to  prayer.  Dr.  Marrett  holds  that  there 
may  be  a  transition  from  magic  to  prayer 
and  back  again.  Since  both  belong  to  the 
sphere  of  the  supernatural,  and  "because  it 
tends  to  be  conceived  as  an  affair  between 
wills,  magic,  though  distinct,  has  something 
in  common  with  religion,  so  that  interpene- 
tration  and  transfusion  are  possible  between 
them."  Professor  Jevons  finds  that  the 
supreme  difference  between  religion  and 
magic  is  that  the  former  is  social  in  its  aims 
and  the  latter  anti-social.    He  argues  that 


i^ 


40    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

there  has  been  all  the  while  a  yawning 
chasm  of  irreconcilable  difference  between 
the  two.  There  is  another  theory  that  magic 
is  the  outgrowth  of  religious  decadence. 

My  own  conclusions  are  about  as  follows: 
Prayer  and  magic  are  alike  in  that  they  both 
recognize  the  supernatural  and  that  they 
are  matters  of  desire.  They  proceed  by 
different  methods  toward  the  attainment  of 
these  desires.  Magic  employs  spell,  hocus- 
pocus,  incantation,  and  any  possible  method 
of  controlling  the  supernatural.  It  aims  at 
bringing  the  supernatural  under  the  control 
of  the  individual  working  the  spell.  Prayer, 
as  a  rule,  involves  a  higher  conception  of 
the  supernatural  order  and  recognizes  its 
superiority  over  human  affairs.  The  method 
is,  therefore,  the  method  of  petition  and  the 
final  result  the  coalition  of  wills,  either  by 
the  granting  of  the  petition  or  the  bringing 
of  the  will  of  the  petitioner  into  submission 
to  the  will  of  the  superior  power  to  whom 
petition  is  made.  Prayer  and  magic  have 
both  been  used  by  the  same  persons  for  the 
attainment  of  desired  ends,  and  there  has 
been  a  shift  from  one  to  the  other.  There 
has  been  no  observed  decadence  of  magic 


THE  MEANING  OF  PRAYER    41 

and  recognition  of  its  failure  on  the  part  of 
primitive  peoples  such  as  has  been  assumed 
by  Dr.  Frazer.  Religion  has  not  grown  out 
of  magic,  for  its  origin  is  quite  as  ancient  as 
that  of  magic.  Magic  is  not  a  result  of  the 
failure  and  decadence  of  religion,  for  religion 
was  found  among  primitive  peoples,  and 
identified  by  prayer,  and  was  certainly  not 
decadent  in  that  period  of  human  life.  Yet 
we  must  admit  that  when  religion  does  be- 
come decadent  and  corrupt,  it  tends  to  run 
over  into  superstition  and  its  practices  into 
magic.  The  formulae  of  prayer  are  magical 
elements  in  prayer.  When  they  are  not  used 
for  the  sake  of  definiteness  and  order,  but 
are  regarded  as  essential  and  efficacious, 
they  partake  of  the  nature  of  the  magic 
spell.  Repetitions,  such  as  the  use  of  the 
prayer  wheel  in  India  or  the  reiteration  of 
the  name  of  Allah  in  the  prayers  of  Moham- 
medans, are  examples  of  magical  tendencies 
in  prayer.  And  the  feeling  on  the  part  of 
Christians  that  prayer  is  not  quite  right 
unless  it  closes  with  "Amen"  preceded  by 
other  regular  formulae  is  a  leaning  in  the 
direction  of  magic.  But  on  the  whole,  the 
evolutionary  tendency  of  prayer  has  been 


42     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

upward  toward  spirituality  and  a  place  of 
honor  while  magic  has  among  enlightened 
peoples  been  relegated  to  the  realm  of 
legerdemain,  where  it  is  recognized  as  a 
thing  of  trickery  and  deceit  and  interesting 
only  for  the  skill  of  the  deception. 

Prayer  and  Mysticism 

Mysticism  is  a  name  for  a  variety  of 
psychological  experiences.  Like  magic,  it  is 
difficult  to  define,  because  the  term  has  been 
so  widely  and  so  vaguely  used.  It  also  lies 
without  the  realm  of  common  experiences 
and  its  content  is  in  the  very  nature  of  the 
case  without  standards  of  comparison.  I 
maintain  that  it  is  perfectly  possible,  by 
calling  in  the  whole  list  of  types  of  expe- 
rience that  it  has  been  used  to  cover,  in 
some  such  way  as  William  James  defines 
religion,  to  define  it  beyond  question  or 
quibble.  However,  such  a  definition  is  un- 
necessary for  the  present  purpose.  All  that 
we  need  to  know  of  mysticism  here  is  a 
group  of  sufficient  facts  to  trace  its  contacts 
with  prayer. 

I  am  aware  that  I  am  entering  a  realm 
that  is  held  in  greater  or  less  suspicion. 


THE  MEANING  OF  PRAYER    43 

Nevertheless,  mysticism  is  one  of  the  phe- 
nomenal facts  of  religious  history.  All  the 
great  religions  have  it — Christianity,  Bud- 
dhism, Mohammedanism,  Brahmanism. 
Christianity,  ancient  and  modern.  Catholic 
and  Protestant,  has  a  long  line  and  a  great 
variety  of  mystics.  Saint  Paul  is  giving  us 
the  circumstances  of  a  mystical  experience 
in  the  first  part  of  the  twelfth  chapter  of 
Second  Corinthians.  Saint  Francis  was  a 
mystic.  Luther  had  mystical  experiences. 
John  Wesley  and  Oliver  Cromwell  have  been 
called  practical  mystics.  The  writings  of 
religious  mystics  are  voluminous  and  much 
has  been  written  about  it.  It  forms  an  im- 
portant part  of  the  psychology  of  religion. 

But  not  only  is  mysticism  found  in  reli- 
gion. It  is  also  found  in  poetry.  Tennyson 
was  a  self-confessed  mystic.  Wordsworth 
was  a  mystic  in  his  communion  with  nature. 
So  was  Walt  WTiitman.  In  fact,  it  may  be 
said  that  the  mystical  turn  of  mind  is  essen- 
tial to  the  poetic  temperament.  And  mys- 
ticism may  be  found  among  scientists  who 
have  experiences  of  direct  communion  with 
nature. 

Mysticism  is  the  attempt  to  get  into 


44     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

direct  relation  with  fundamental  reality  by 
means  of  intuition.  It  professes  to  use  a 
process  of  knowledge-getting  that  is  beyond 
the  process  of  intellection.  Things  must  be 
felt  in  this  realm  rather  than  conceived. 
Intellection  would  be  impossible,  because 
there  are  no  standards  of  comparison,  and 
thinking  is  a  process  of  comparison.  The 
order  of  consciousness  belonging  to  mysti- 
cism has  been  called  cosmic  consciousness.  It 
has  also  been  referred  to  as  a  superconscious- 
ness,  an  interesting  word  when  placed  over 
against  the  usual  term  of  "subconscious- 
ness." This  is  the  realm  of  inspiration. 
When  one  is  lifted  out  of  himself,  so  to  speak, 
and  apprehends  truth  by  means  of  illumina- 
tion, gets  hold  of  it  directly  without  logical 
process,  he  is  said  to  be  inspired.  And  the 
mental  state  is  a  mystical  state.  In  this  state 
the  mind  is  regarded  as  passive  and  recep- 
tive. Persons  who  have  had  mystical  states 
of  consciousness  are  emphatic  in  pronounc- 
ing them  indescribable,  and  usually  are 
under  strong  convictions  produced  by  the 
truth  that  they  believe  they  have  appre- 
hended in  their  mystical  experience. 

Before  passing  upon  the  authority  of  such 


THE  MEANING  OF  PRAYER     45 

consciousness  as  this,  it  will  be  well  to  note 
certain  of  its  governing  conditions.  In  the 
first  place,  these  mystical  states  are  clearly 
influenced  by  previous  thinking  and  belief. 
A  Mohammedan  never  has  been  known  to 
receive  Christian  revelations  in  a  mystical 
experience.  A  Protestant  does  not  have  a 
sense  of  the  presence  of  the  Virgin  Mary. 
A  Buddhist  will  always  get  reenforcement 
for  Buddhistic  thoughts.  Professor  James 
notes  that  the  tendency  of  mystical  con- 
sciousness is  dominantly  in  the  direction  of 
monism  or  pantheism.  But  I  venture  to  say 
that  this  is  due  to  the  influence  of  dominant 
philosophical  opinions  which  the  subjects 
had  either  espoused  or  absorbed.  If  phi- 
losophy in  their  past  experience  had  been  the 
philosophy  of  Professor  James,  a  decided 
pluralistic  tendency  might  have  been  ob- 
served in  mystical  experience.  These  expe- 
riences were  also  dependent  upon  the 
mentality  of  the  subject.  His  strength  of 
mind  would  be  a  measure  of  their  profun- 
dity. And  behind  them  there  is  often  evident 
a  pathological  condition.  This  does  not 
discredit  them,  but  it  opens  them  to  suspi- 
cion and  critical  testing. 


46     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

But  great  and  valuable  truth  has  come 
through  mystical  experience,  especially  by 
inspiration.  A  few  rationalists  may  have  the 
stubbornness  to  deny  this  but  not  many. 
Men  have  had  discovery  in  sudden  flashes 
out  of  the  depths  of  their  being.  Sometimes 
it  has  gradually  dawned  upon  them  like  the 
coming  of  the  morning,  when  the  sun  sud- 
denly lifts  himself  over  the  horizon  in  the 
climax  of  the  dawn.  Both  poetry  and 
prophecy  have  been  fruitful  in  this  way. 

Frank  W.  Boreham  in  his  essay  on  "A 
Woman's  Reason"  gets  into  something  that 
is  very  profound.  We  arrive  at  conclusions 
and  then  find  reasons  for  supporting  those 
conclusions.  We  come  to  feel  that  things 
are  so  and  find  our  reasons  afterward.  Often 
our  conclusions  are  unassailable,  though  we 
have  reached  them  by  faulty  logical  proc- 
esses or  none  at  all.  We  just  feel  that  they 
are  true.  We  cannot  tell  why.  All  this  is 
closely  akin  to  mysticism  if  it  is  not  mys- 
ticism itself. 

As  to  the  authority  of  specific  experiences, 
we  may  take  Professor  James'  statement 
that  these  experiences  are  authoritative  for 
those  who  have  them  in  so  far  as  they 


THE  MEANING  OF  PRAYER     47 

produce  conviction,  but  the  one  who  does 
not  have  them  is  under  no  obHgation  to 
accept  their  conclusions  without  question  or 
criticism.  But  they  certainly  preclude  ra- 
tionalism from  taking  the  whole  field  of 
truth  seeking. 

The  reader  may  have  been  wondering 
what  all  this  has  to  do  with  the  meaning  of 
prayer.  We  have  gone  a  little  wide  from  the 
path  of  direct  dealing  with  the  subject,  but 
it  has  been  rather  necessary  for  laying  our 
foundations.  It  will  be  remembered  that 
prayer  was  defined  in  the  outset  as  any  sort 
of  communion  or  conversation  with  the 
Power  regarded  as  divine.  Direct  contact 
with  this  divine  Power  must  be,  therefore, 
in  the  very  nature  of  the  case  of  mystical 
experience.  A  sense  of  union  with  the 
Divine  is  mystic  communion,  and  it  is  in- 
cluded in  the  very  definition  of  prayer.  The 
communion  aspect  of  prayer  is  mystical. 
And  religious  inspiration  is  often  arrived  at 
as  the  result  of  prayer.  Prayer  is  the  means 
of  inner  illumination  and  discovery  of  reli- 
gious truth.  Prayer  is  not  only  conditioned 
by  faith  but  it  generates  faith.  Prayer, 
therefore,  in  its  profoundest  sense  and  in  its 


48    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

highest  development  is  a  mystical  expe- 
rience. Not  only  so,  but  prayer  is  usually 
the  generating  cause  of  the  religious  mysti- 
cal experience  as  a  whole.  Jesus  on  the 
Mount  of  the  Transfiguration  by  means  of 
prayer  reached  a  condition  of  spiritual 
exaltation  and  illumination  which  trans- 
figured the  whole  aspect  of  his  person  and 
communicated  itself  to  his  attendant  dis- 
ciples. Moses,  after  a  long  period  of  com- 
munion with  God,  came  down  from  the 
mount  with  his  face  shining  and  with  a  new 
message  for  Israel.  The  state  of  mind  in  the 
mystical  experience  has  been  regarded  as 
passive  and  receptive.  But  it  is  not  so 
passive  and  receptive  as  it  seems.  The 
withdrawal  of  consciousness  from  mundane 
things  and  its  concentration  on  the  divine 
is  a  thing  of  strenuous  eflFort.  That  effort  is 
prayer. 

Here  is  a  realm  of  profound  significance 
and  unlimited  spiritual  possibility.  We  need 
to  approach  it  cautiously  and  carefully  and 
to  test  its  experiences  as  far  as  we  can  by 
comparison  and  adjustment.  We  need  to 
use  our  intellect  for  what  it  was  intended,  a 
safety  device  for  the  living  of  our  mental 


THE  MEANING  OF  PRAYER     49 

life.  If  we  will  have  none  of  mysticism,  then 
we  shall  remain  cold  and  prayerless  ration- 
alists, without  the  joy  and  exhilaration  of 
inspiration  and  without  the  privilege  of 
communion  with  God.  If  we  plunge  into  it 
too  freely  and  without  bringing  reason  to 
our  aid,  we  are  in  danger  of  becoming 
fanatical. 

We  have  been  making  a  study  of  prayer 
by  a  sort  of  synthetic  method.  It  will  be 
profitable  for  us  now  to  study  it  by  the 
method  of  analysis,  taking  as  our  basis  the 
most  perfectly  developed  and  most  compre- 
hensive form  of  prayer.  This  study  we 
reserve  for  another  chapter. 


CHAPTER  III 

PRAYER  IN  ITS  HIGHEST  DEVELOP^ 
MENT 

The  Lord's  Prayer  as  a  Model 

In  our  study  of  prayer  we  have  sought  to 
arrive  at  its  meaning  by  a  consideration  of 
its  general  character,  its  beginnings  and  its 
interconnection  with  kindred  phases  of  hu- 
man development.  By  putting  these  things 
together  we  get  what  may  be  called  a 
synthetic  view  of  prayer.  Our  understand- 
ing of  prayer  will  be  enlarged  if  we  approach 
the  subject  from  another  angle.  That  is  to 
take  for  analysis  a  prayer  example  which 
will  serve  as  an  illustration  of  prayer  in  its 
highest  and  most  complete  development. 
This  example  is  the  "Lord's  Prayer."  It 
commends  itself  to  this  kind  of  treatment, 
because  it  was  given  to  the  disciples  as  a 
model  prayer,  as  a  prayer  containing  and 
exemplifying  the  essentials  of  prayer. 

Anything  like  a  halfway  thorough  con- 
sideration of  this  great  prayer  in  comparison 
with  other  prayers  will  serve  to  show  that  it 
50 


HIGHEST  DEVELOPMENT     51 

is  the  outstanding  example  of  prayer  devel- 
opment. Nothing  in  the  history  of  rehgion 
has  in  any  way  measured  up  to  its  complete- 
ness, in  principle  and  in  profound  meaning. 
I  may  go  further  and  say  that  it  can  never 
be  surpassed.  This  is  a  dangerous  thing  to 
say  of  any  attainment;  but  its  truth  will  be 
so  apparent,  after  a  study  of  the  prayer, 
that  it  will  not  even  be  called  in  question. 
Jesus  has  given  us  the  last  word  in  prayer 
expression.  There  is  no  going  beyond  it  in 
meaning  or  motive  or  mood.  It  shines  forth 
in  the  splendor  of  self-evident  perfection. 
No  conception  of  God  or  of  life  can  ever  go 
beyond  what  it  contains.  And  with  all  its 
completeness  and  perfection,  it  has  sim- 
plicity. Its  meaning  is  the  utmost  in  pro- 
fundity and  at  the  same  time  easy  to 
understand.  An  analysis  of  this  prayer  will 
be  the  most  profitable  study  that  is  possible. 

The  Social  Nature  of  Prayer 

The  first  word  of  the  Lord's  Prayer  is 
significant,  the  plural  of  the  first  person  of 
the  possessive  pronoun.  The  plural  of  the 
first  person  is  used  throughout  the  prayer. 
It  is  a  recognition  of  the  fact  that  prayer  is 


52     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

a  social  matter.  It  had  been  so  for  a  long 
while.  The  practices  of  the  Jewish  religion 
had  determined  it  so.  The  religious  con- 
sciousness of  the  Jews  was  a  social  conscious- 
ness, so  strongly  so  that  the  individual  was 
almost  lost  sight  of.  It  was  a  national 
religion.  It  had  a  doctrine  of  salvation,  but 
that  salvation  was  the  salvation  of  a  people. 

Jesus  brought  into  religious  thinking  with 
no  uncertain  emphasis  the  worth  of  the 
individual,  but  he  did  not  minimize  the 
social  side  of  religion.  He  established  the 
fact  that  the  individual  is  inseparable  from 
his  relations  with  his  neighbors,  and  he 
widened  the  meaning  of  neighborliness  until 
it  swept  aside  all  cleavages  and  distinctions 
and  included  all  humanity.  Jesus  was 
putting  the  idea  of  brotherhood  into  his 
model  prayer.  He  desired  that  his  disciples, 
in  that  most  sacred  and  significant  act  of 
religion,  the  direct  approach  to  the  presence 
of  God,  should  carry  with  them  an  acknowl- 
edgment of  their  community  of  interest. 

There  is  in  the  word  a  beautiful  idea  of 
unselfishness  which  seeks  to  merge  the  per- 
sonal and  individual  concerns  with  the 
concerns  of  the  group.      It  is  laying  the 


HIGHEST  DEVELOPMENT     53 

foundation  for  peace  and  harmony  and 
brotherly  love  among  his  followers  and  lay- 
ing it  out  of  the  foundation  stones  of  reli- 
gious life  and  practice.  After  all,  the  great 
social  need  of  the  present  time  is  the  need 
of  unselfishness.  It  is  selfish  greed,  selfish 
ambition,  selfish  nearsightedness  that  stand 
most  in  the  way  of  the  attainment  of  the 
greatest  general  good.  The  only  hope  of 
relief  from  social  discord  is  for  humanity  to 
learn  to  think  and  pray  in  the  plural. 

And  this  is  a  far  cry  from  the  blandish- 
ments of  the  primitive  worshiper  that  he 
may  move  his  god  to  the  granting  of  per- 
sonal and  material  claims.  It  is  a  far  cry 
from  some  of  the  prayers  of  the  psalmist. 
It  is  a  far  cry  from  the  spirit  of  the  present. 
The  spirit  of  this  little  word  at  the  opening 
of  this  great  prayer  is  the  spirit  of  Christian 
perfection.  Its  implication  of  brotherhood 
and  cooperation,  of  love  and  unselfishness, 
is  the  ultimate  in  Christian  attainment.  It 
is  the  acme  of  all  religion. 

The  Fatherhood  of  God 

"Our  Father."  Every  word  of  this  great 
prayer  is  pregnant  with  meaning,  but  none 


54     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER      ^ 

more  so  than  the  word  "Father."  The  word 
indicates  an  assumption  of  friendHness  on 
the  part  of  the  Deity.  This  assumption  is 
something  that  had  to  be  acquired  in  the 
process  of  rehgious  evolution.  Primitive 
man  did  not  have  it.  George  Santayana  says 
that  fear  created  the  gods.  That  is  one  of 
the  conclusions  of  an  atheist,  rather  hasty 
and  overdrawn;  but  we  must  recognize  in 
the  primitive  religious  consciousness,  in  so 
far  as  we  have  opportunity  to  observe  it,  the 
dominancy  of  the  emotion  of  fear.  It  was  a 
long  while  until  man  came  to  discover  the 
friendliness  of  God,  and  it  required  longer 
to  stumble  on  the  realization  that  the 
Supreme  Being  was  a  loving  Father.  This 
notion  revolutionized  the  whole  meaning  of 
prayer.  The  assumption  of  the  Lord's 
Prayer  is  that  God  is  solicitous  on  our  be- 
half. We  are  led  to  take  it  for  granted  that 
God  cares  for  us  and  we  make  our  approach 
on  that  assumption.  That  assumption  was 
not  developed  in  a  day.  It  represents  a  long 
course  of  religious  evolution  and  a  develop- 
ment of  the  idea  of  God  from  the  very 
crudest  notions  of  the  supernatural  to  the 
sublime  moral  ideal  of  the  Christian  doctrine 


PIIGHEST  DEVELOPMENT     55 

of  the  divine.  Some  of  the  outstanding 
personaHties  in  the  development  of  rehgion 
among  the  Hebrews  had  glimmerings  of  this 
conception  of  God.  Abraham,  Moses,  the 
psalmists  and  the  prophets  were  uplifted  by 
moments  of  inspiration  when  they  almost 
appropriated  by  faith  this  fundamental 
teaching  of  Jesus  concerning  God.  But  the 
fear  motive  in  prayer  was  slow  to  let  go  and 
the  assumption  was  only  half  made.  But 
Christian  prayer  is,  in  the  words  of  Dr. 
Fosdick,  "the  personal  appropriation  of  the 
faith  that  God  cares  for  each  of  us." 

The  word  "Father"  also  carries  the  idea 
of  the  essential  oneness  of  humanity  and 
divinity.  The  supernatural  is  not  an  order 
wholly  incommensurable  with  the  natural 
order.  It  is  the  extension  of  the  natural 
order  into  the  realm  of  higher  realities. 
Humanity  is  the  offspring  of  divinity.  Jesus 
had  these  ideas  in  mind  as  he  made  the 
prayer,  and  he  meant  for  his  followers  to  get 
hold  of  them  as  soon  as  they  were  able  to 
bear  them.  God  is  to  be  regarded  as  the 
source  of  all  life  and  the  Author  of  all  being. 
Nothing  can  go  beyond  this  in  religious 
conception. 


56     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

Heaven,  as  the  abiding  place  of  divinity, 
is  to  be  regarded,  not  so  much  as  a  place  of 
abode  above  the  earth,  but  more  as  a  state 
or  condition  of  spiritual  elevation.  The 
heavenly  order  is  the  realm  of  spiritual 
superiority.  The  "kingdom  of  heaven"  is  to 
come  upon  the  earth  as  a  more  exalted 
condition  of  righteousness  and  religious  life 
than  it  has  ever  yet  been  possible  for  man 
to  reaUze.  Heaven  denotes  spiritual  lofti- 
ness and  supremacy.  Jesus  never  intended 
to  take  God  out  of  the  world  and  put  him 
above  the  stars.  It  is  the  literalistic  ten- 
dency of  Occidental  interpretation  that  has 
done  that. 

Prayer  and  Praise 

"Thy  name  be  hallowed,  thy  kingdom 
come,  thy  will  be  done  on  earth  as  it  is  in 
heaven."  This  model  prayer  of  the  Master 
does  not  begin  immediately  after  addressing 
the  Deity  with  a  petition.  It  carries  the 
ideas  of  high  courtesy  and  good  manners 
into  the  practice  of  prayer.  It  is  another 
testimony  to  the  fact  that  Jesus  was  a 
gentleman.  This  prayer  begins  with  praise, 
and  praise  is  the  essential  meaning  of  wor- 


HIGHEST  DEVELOPMENT     57 

ship.  I  think  it  may  be  contended  safely 
that  prayer  in  its  eariiest  forms  and  condi- 
tions was  not  worship.  It  had  not  reached 
the  plane  of  worship.  It  could  not  be 
worship  until  it  carried  the  note  of  praise. 
It  could  not  carry  the  note  of  praise  until 
the  one  making  prayer  could  lose  sight  of 
selfish  interests  long  enough  for  praise,  and 
until  he  had  acquired  an  exalted  conception 
of  the  supernatural  that  would  provoke 
praise.  It  is  only  in  an  accommodated  sense 
that  we  can  speak  of  the  prayers  of  prim- 
itive people,  and  even  many  modern  prayers, 
as  worship.  Worship  is  not  present  in  a 
prayer  until  there  is  a  genuine  feeling  of 
reverence  and  adoration  for  the  power 
regarded  as  divine.  It  may  be  that  fear 
passes  into  awe  and  awe  into  reverence,  but 
worship  is  not  present  without  reverence. 

Praise,  to  be  genuine,  must  be  emotional. 
There  must  be  an  outflow  of  feeling  in  the 
direction  of  the  one  praised.  The  language 
of  praise  is  always  the  language  of  feeling. 
The  fervency  of  prayer  is  largely  in  the 
praise  element.  Petitions  may  be  earnest 
and  intense,  but  they  lack  the  overbubbling 
outflow  of  praise.  They  are  often  forced  out 


58     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

under  the  pressure  of  circumstances  or  under 
the  stress  of  mtense  desire.  Praise  is  an 
overflow  of  the  cup  of  feehng. 

Praise  exalts  the  worshiper  as  well  as  the 
worshiped.  The  contemplation  of  high 
values,  the  centering  of  attention  upon  sub- 
lime objects  of  consideration,  the  lifting  of 
thought  and  feeling  into  these  high  and 
exalted  moods  is  soul-elevating.  Praise  is 
the  noblest  aspect  of  prayer.  Prayer  that 
has  been  too  practical  and  utilitarian  in  its 
nature  has  suflFered  a  distinct  loss  in  high 
quality. 

It  will  be  remembered  that  in  the  dis- 
cussion of  magic  as  related  to  prayer,  magic 
was  said  to  move  the  supernatural  by  a 
method  of  control  while  prayer  proceeded 
on  the  basis  of  dependence  to  make  request, 
and  also  that  prayer  assumes  supremacy  of 
the  supernatural  while  magic  does  not.  In 
the  voice  of  praise  we  hear  a  clear  acknowl- 
edgment of  divine  supremacy. 

It  may  be  contended  that  in  the  Lord's 
Prayer  what  we  have  been  treating  as  praise 
is  really  a  petition,  a  petition  for  the  realiza- 
tion of  high  spiritual  values.  It  is  entirely 
true  that  this  sentence  is  cast  in  the  form 


HIGHEST  DEVELOPMENT     59 

of  a  petition,  but  the  spirit  is  that  of  praise 
— adoration,  exaltation,  glorification.  There 
is  a  submission,  but  it  is  not  a  forced  or 
reluctant  submission.  It  is  an  exultant  con- 
fession of  divine  supremacy. 

Petitions  for  Material  Needs 

"Give  us  this  day  our  daily  bread."  Our 
religion  is  not  to  be  divorced  from  our 
physical  life,  the  life  of  material  needs.  Our 
material  needs  are  real  needs,  and  God  is  as 
really  the  source  of  our  physical  life  and  the 
source  of  supply  for  our  material  needs  as 
he  is  the  source  of  our  spiritual  life  and  the 
source  of  supply  for  our  spiritual  needs.  Our 
physical  life  is  sacredly  bound  up  with  our 
spiritual  life.  There  is  no  way  of  separating 
them  and  there  is  no  antagonism  between 
them.  They  simply  need  to  be  rightly 
related. 

This  phase  of  Christ's  model  prayer  is  an 
acknowledgment  of  God's  ownership  of  the 
world  and  all  its  fullness.  It  is  also  the 
acknowledgment  of  the  Christian's  depen- 
dence on  God  for  the  things  of  ordinary  life. 
According  to  Christian  teaching,  there  is  no 
phase  of  our  life  that  is  not  sacred.    In  the 


60    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

original  Christian  consciousness  there  was 
Httle  idea  of  the  separation  of  the  sacred 
and  the  secular.  The  religious  consciousness 
is  to  be  carried  into  all  the  details  of  the 
daily  life.  It  is  thus  with  Orientals  to-day 
and  always  in  all  religions.  It  is  only  the 
Occidental  who  can  think  of  divorcing  his 
everyday  life  from  his  religion.  That  is  per- 
haps the  reason  that  religion  is  so  vital  with 
the  Oriental  that,  where  he  is  uninfluenced 
by  Western  civilization,  he  is  never  without 
it.  There  are  no  nonreligious  persons  in  the 
great  Orient. 

This  acknowledgment  of  dependence  upon 
God  for  the  daily  necessities  of  existence  and 
the  expression  of  daily  trust  in  God  in  no 
way  imply  that  the  burden  of  providence  is 
to  be  entirely  shifted  to  God's  shoulders.  It 
assumes  daily  toil  and  personal  effort  at  the 
attainment  of  ends.  And  I  call  attention  to 
the  modesty  of  the  appeal.  It  does  not  ask 
for  luxury.  It  does  not  pour  out  a  request 
for  every  possible  object  of  heart's  desire. 
All  that  it  asks  for  is  that  as  a  result  of  the 
sweat  of  our  brow  we  may  be  granted  our 
daily  bread.  There  is  no  suggestion  here 
that  it  is  wrong  for  us  to  have  more  than 


HIGHEST  DEVELOPMENT     61 

this.  The  divine  bounty  is  a  wondrous 
thing.  God  is  not  only  *'able  to  do 
abundantly  above  all  that  we  ask  or  think," 
but  he  is  willing  to  do  this,  and  graciously 
does  it.  However,  we  are  not  to  presume  in 
prayer  upon  the  goodness  of  God.  This 
limitation  on  prayer  sounds  the  death  knell 
of  all  magic  in  the  practices  of  the  Christian 
religion. 

The  Moral  Element  in  Prayer 

"Forgive  our  trespasses  as  we  forgive 
them  that  trespass  against  us.  And  lead  us  '^y^  ^ 
not  into  temptation,  but  deliver  us  from 
evil."  These  are  expressions  that  set  Chris- 
tian prayer  transcendently  above  the  prayer 
of  all  other  religions.  These  expressions  con- 
tain the  noblest  element  in  prayer  and  in 
religion  as  a  whole.  That  is  the  moral  ele- 
ment. It  appears  in  the  prayers  of  other 
religions,  but  not  with  such  clearness  and 
loftiness  of  ideal. 

There  has  been  a  debate  as  to  whether 
religion  preceded  morality  or  morality  pre- 
ceded religion.  In  truth,  both  sides  of  the 
debate  have  been  captured  by  the  fallacy 
of  "either  or."    The  facts  of  evidence  seem 


62     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

to  show  that  rehgion  and  morahty  have 
existed  together  from  the  beginning.  They 
are  distinctions  in  one  consciousness  and 
hfe.  The  divine  has  always  been  regarded 
as  connected  with  the  fundamental  social 
interests  of  the  group  and  the  idea  of  God, 
or  of  the  supernatural  on  any  plane,  has 
been  associated  with  the  idea  of  moral 
obligation.  Religion  has  enforced  morality 
and  morality  has  strengthened  religion.  Re- 
ligion on  its  practical  side,  its  ethical  side, 
is  the  highest  development  of  morality.  It 
is  the  inclusion  of  both  God  and  man  in 
moral  ideals  and  relations.  There  has  never 
been  a  real  antithesis  between  religion  and 
morality.  Religion  on  its  speculative  side 
and  in  its  ceremonials  may  be  nonmoral. 
Sometimes  it  may  be  immoral.  But  the 
ideas  of  religion  and  morality  have  never 
been  quite  separated  in  human  conscious- 
ness. Morality  has  been  most  powerful  and 
effective  when  it  has  been  undergirded  with 
religious  belief.  Religion  is  noblest,  purest, 
and  highest  in  intellectual  conceptions,  most 
valuable  and  helpful,  when  it  carries  within 
its  system  of  belief  a  highly  developed 
ethics. 


HIGHEST  DEVELOPMENT     63 

Jesus  taught  the  blessedness  of  hungering 
and  thirsting  after  righteousness.  Hunger- 
ing and  thirsting  after  righteousness  is  the 
moral  element  in  prayer.  Hunger  and  thirst 
are  figures  of  desire,  and  prayer  is  a  matter 
of  dominant  desire.  Therefore  Jesus  makes 
the  prayer  for  the  forgiveness  of  sins  and 
preservation  from  temptation  the  emphatic 
note  in  his  model  prayer.  The  big  idea  of 
the  Christian  religion  is  redemption,  or 
salvation  from  sin.  The  prayer^  of  the 
Christian  are  naturally  to  be  burdened  with 
this  matter  of  supreme  concern. 

It  will  be  noted  that  the  petition  for  the 
forgiveness  of  sins  is  characterized  by  the 
same  modesty  that  was  observed  in  the 
petition  for  the  supply  of  daily  material 
needs.  Also  the  connection  of  our  social 
relationships  with  our  relationship  to  God 
is  carried  forward.  Forgiveness  is  petitioned 
on  the  basis  of  our  own  forgiveness  of  others. 
We  have  no  moral  right  to  ask  for  forgive- 
ness beyond  that  which  we  are  willing  to 
accord. 

This  petition  given  in  this  manner  indi- 
cates that  God  is  on  the  same  moral  plane 
with  humanity.    God  is  not  superior  to  his 


64     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

own  moral  principles  governing  conduct. 
Bishop  Francis  J.  McConnell  speaks  truth- 
fully when  he  says  that  "if  God  is  to  claim 
the  loving  self-surrender  of  men's  wills,  he 
can  base  his  claims  only  on  the  ground  that 
his  mighty  powers  are  used  under  a  bond 
of  responsibility."  The  Christian  religion 
makes  the  relation  between  the  human  and 
the  divine  an  ethical  relation  which  puts 
humanity  in  the  same  moral  world  with 
God. 

Humility 

A  characteristic  that  is  evident  through- 
out this  model  prayer,  but  especially  evident 
at  its  close,  is  the  attitude  of  humility  that 
it  assumes  and  teaches.  Humility  is  an 
attitude  toward  God.  Meekness  is  a  cor- 
responding attitude  toward  man.  Humility 
confesses  man's  inferiority  and  dependence. 
It  also  acknowledges  the  glory,  greatness 
and  power  of  God.  It  bows  the  worshiper 
to  the  divine  will.  This  attitude  at  the 
close  of  the  prayer  means  the  surrender  of 
all  authority  in  a  final  way  to  God.  It 
means  a  final  leaving  of  all  things  in  the 
hands  of  divine  wisdom  and  power. 


HIGHEST  DEVELOPMENT     65 

This  represents  the  complete  overturning 
of  the  primitive  prayer  attitude.  The 
prayers  of  man  first  aimed  at  moving  the 
will  of  God  in  the  direction  of  a  desired  end. 
The  evolution  of  prayer  has  brought  him  to 
the  effort  of  placing  his  own  will  in  line  with 
the  divine  will  and  his  own  destiny  and  that 
of  others  in  the  hands  of  God.  When  the 
follower  of  Jesus  really  gets  hold  of  his 
Master's  teaching  concerning  prayer,  that 
will  be  his  prayer  motive  and  attitude. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  SUBJECTIVE  EFFECTS  OF 
PRAYER 

The  Value  op  Prayer  Recognized  by 
AN  Atheist 
Professor  George  Santayana,  the  ma- 
terialistic philosopher  of  Harvard,  although 
an  atheist,  believes  that  prayer  has  value. 
For  him  God  has  no  existential  reality  but 
is  simply  a  set  of  values.  For  that  matter, 
no  part  of  religion  has  for  him  more  than 
a  subjective  reality.  Prayer  is  just  a 
soliloquy,  but  as  a  soliloquy  it  has  value. 
It  has  a  poetic  value.  It  serves  the  soul  in 
the  adjustment  to  the  conditions  of  life  and 
in  making  existence  endurable.  Prayer  as 
an  exercise  is  useful  for  its  subjective  effects. 
Now,  it  must  be  admitted  that  the  average 
man  will  have  little  interest  in  such  a 
spiritual  dilettantism  as  this.  If  prayer  is 
only  a  soliloquy,  God  only  a  set  of  values, 
and  religious  ideas  purely  subjective,  and 
religious  practice  is  valuable  only  as  a  vague 
poetic  symbolism,  he  will  have  none  of  it. 
66 


SUBJECTIVE    EFFECTS       67 

He  would  rather  turn  with  brutal  frankness 
to  pessimism  and  final  despair  or  to  the 
cynical  epicureanism  which  says,  "Eat, 
drink,  and  be  merry,  for  tomorrow  ye  die." 
But  if  he  can  believe  sincerely  in  the  real 
existence  of  religious  objects  and  objectives, 
if  he  can  believe  that  the  things  of  religion 
have  a  reality  of  their  own  outside  of  and 
beyond  his  own  thinking,  he  may  be  brought 
to  the  exercise  of  prayer,  and  may  come  to 
realize  that  in  the  matter  of  analysis  prayer 
may  have  subjective  effects  that  are  distinct 
from  objective  effects  and  just  as  real.  A 
belief  in  the  reality  of  the  objective  facts 
of  religion  is  necessary  to  give  his  prayer 
sincerity;  but,  once  that  prayer  is  uttered, 
his  belief  in  the  solid  reality  of  God  and  the 
spiritual  world  does  not  shut  his  eyes  to  the 
purely  subjective  effects  of  prayer  in  his 
own  life  and  to  their  value.  It  is  our  purpose 
in  this  chapter  to  discuss  the  subjective 
effects  of  sincere  prayer,  based  on  a  faith 
in  the  substantial  reality  of  God  and  other 
religious  objects. 

The  Soul-Unifying  Effect  of  Prayer 
Much  of  the  writing  of  Professor  James 


68     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

on  matters  of  religious  experience  has  been 
based  on  the  theory  of  a  divided  self.  By  a 
divided  self  he  means  the  inner  conflict  of 
the  soul.  It  is  a  conflict  of  desires,  of 
motives,  of  beliefs,  of  emotions,  of  convic- 
tions on  the  battlefield  of  the  human  heart. 
Saint  Paul  bears  testimony  to  the  fact  of 
such  an  internal  state  of  conflict.  He  speaks 
of  it  as  a  war  between  his  members,  and  says 
that  when  he  would  do  good,  evil  is  present 
with  him.  The  soul  seeks  relief  from  this 
conflict.  One  very  effective  means  of  ending 
the  struggle  and  resolving  the  conflict  is 
prayer. 

Dr.  Harry  Emerson  Fosdick,  in  that 
wonderful  little  book,  The  Meaning  of 
Prayer,^  has  a  chapter  entitled  "Prayer  as  a 
Battlefield."  In  this  chapter  he  deals  with 
prayer  as  an  inner  struggle  of  souls  in  work- 
ing out  problems  of  duty  and  settling  ques- 
tions of  destiny.  Jesus  prays  through  to  the 
settlement  of  the  conflict  in  the  temptation 
experience  at  the  opening  of  his  ministry;  at 
the  mount  of  the  transfiguration,  before 
making  the  final  journey  to  Jerusalem;  and, 

*  Taken  from  The  Meaning  oj  Prayer,  by  H.  E.  Fosdick. 
Association  Press,  New  York. 


SUBJECTIVE    EFFECTS        69 

finally,  in  the  garden  of  Gethsemane.  Paul 
prayed  through  to  victory  in  the  struggle 
with  the  flesh,  and  "the  biographies  of 
praying  men  show  us  that  their  struggles 
for  right  desire  were  fought  out  on  the 
battlefield  of  prayer."  "The  decisive  battles 
of  the  world,"  says  Dr.  Fosdick,  "are  hid- 
den, and  all  outward  conflicts  are  but  the 
echo  and  reverberation  of  that  more  real 
and  inward  war."  "Prayer  is  a  fight  for  the 
power  to  see  and  the  courage  to  do  the  will 
of  God." 

The  doctrine  of  modern  biology  is  that  all 
life  is  a  process  of  adaptation  to  environ- 
ment. Psychology  has  taken  over  this 
assumption.  The  inner  struggles  of  men,  as 
well  as  the  outer  struggles,  are  efforts  at  this 
adaptation.  Now,  adaptation  may  come  in 
two  ways.  It  may  come  through  a  surrender 
to  conditions  and  the  following  of  the  line  of 
least  resistance.  This  will  lead  to  weakness 
and  finally  to  extinction.  Or  adjustment 
may  come  through  the  mastery  of  condi- 
tions and  the  adaptation  of  environment  to 
the  triumph  of  spiritual  forces.  Prayer 
pursues  the  method  of  conquering  condi- 
tions and  conforming  environment. 


70    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

But  this  process  in  the  spiritual  world  is 
regulated  by  a  supreme  factor,  the  will  of 
God,  as  understood  by  the  religious  person. 
The  struggle  of  prayer  is  the  process  of 
making  the  will  of  God  supreme  over  all 
other  motives.  The  soul  of  man  does  not 
surrender  to  the  will  of  God  as  a  defeated 
and  conquered  thing.  The  spiritual  nature 
of  man  shares  the  triumph  of  the  divine  will 
over  those  inner  forces  that  are  evil  and 
unsplritual.  The  submission  of  the  religious 
soul  to  the  will  of  God  is  a  triumphant  sub- 
mission, the  submission  that  recognizes  it- 
self as  the  appropriation  of  power,  the  sur- 
render that  sees  itself  as  victory. 

The  end  of  the  struggle  is  peace.  Men 
have  often  spoken  of  prayer  as  restfulness 
and  quietude.  Jeremy  Taylor  called  it  "the 
peace  of  our  spirit,  the  stillness  of  our 
thoughts,  the  evenness  of  our  recollection." 
Peace  comes  after  conflict  and  calm  after 
storm,  but  prayer  is  in  the  conflict  and 
storm  as  well  as  in  the  peace  and  calm.  The 
peace  and  the  calm  are  the  achievements 
of  prayer. 

The  struggle  of  prayer  and  the  resultant 
peace  leave  a  permanent  deposit  in  the  soul 


SUBJECTIVE    EFFECTS        71 

of  patience  and  poise  and  sweetness  of  spirit. 
The  oftener  the  experiences  of  prayer  and 
the  more  profound,  the  more  refined  and 
steadier  and  more  serene  becomes  the  soul 
of  the  man  of  prayer. 

A  Generator  of  Faith 

Prayer  is  made  on  the  basis  of  faith. 
Prayer  without  an  underlying  basis  of  faith 
is  an  absurdity.  It  can  have  no  substance 
and  no  sincerity.  But  this  is  not  the  end  of 
the  connection  between  faith  and  prayer. 
Prayer  generates  faith.  It  may  seem  a 
curious  paradox  that  we  make  faith  the 
basis  of  our  praying  and  also  that  we  come 
to  believe  in  God  all  the  more  strongly  be- 
cause we  pray  to  him ;  and  that  we  come  to 
have  faith  in  the  realization  of  ends  because 
we  have  made  them  the  subjects  of  prayer. 
Yet  such  is  the  case.  Experience  has  proved 
it.  Men  have  often  prayed  through  to  a 
steadfast  faith  in  God,  when  they  scarcely 
believed  in  him  at  all  when  first  they  began 
praying.  Prayer  discovers  God  to  men.  We 
come  to  know  men  by  talking  with  them,  by 
holding  fellowship  with  them.  We  come  to 
know  God  in  the  same  way.     When  men 


72     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

pray  to  the  power  they  regard  as  divine,  the 
positing  of  the  ideal  of  God  in  their  minds 
tends  to  give  the  Divine  Being  a  reality 
that  no  amount  of  philosophizing  could  do, 
and  certainly  far  more  than  inaction  or  in- 
diflference  could  do.  Professor  Coe  says  that 
a  prerequisite  of  prayer  is  not  so  much  faith 
as  a  particular  direction  of  attention.  The 
unconvinced  have  often  been  overwhelmed 
by  the  exercise  of  attention  toward  the 
things  for  which  they  have  distrust  or  an- 
tipathy. So  he  says  that  in  prayer  faith  is 
often  born  or  reborn.  Many  a  man  has 
started  into  prayer  troubled  with  uncer- 
tainty and  burdened  with  doubt  to  emerge 
from  his  prayer  experience  grounded  in 
certainty  and  firmly  settled  in  his  convic- 
tions and  beliefs.  His  prayer  has  begun  as 
a  struggle  with  doubt.  It  has  ended  with 
the  possession  of  a  triumphant,  confident, 
victorious  faith. 

Whether  or  not  it  is  certain  that  faith  is 
a  prerequisite  of  effective  prayer,  it  is  cer- 
tain that  prayer  is  essential  to  a  living  faith. 
No  man  can  maintain  a  vital  religious  faith 
without  a  steady  exercise  of  prayer.  Faith 
will  die  away  without  prayer  in  the  same 


SUBJECTIVE    EFFECTS        73 

way  that  an  organ  of  the  body  will  suffer 
atrophy  without  exercise. 

The  power  that  can  generate  religious 
faith  and  keep  it  alive  in  the  heart  of  man 
is  a  thing  of  infinite  service.  We  have  men- 
tioned the  fact  that  Professor  Santayana, 
the  atheist,  has  paid  tribute  to  the  value  of 
prayer  as  a  subjective  exercise.  He  claims 
that  religion  is  good  for  mankind,  though  he 
cannot  bring  himself  to  believe  in  the  exis- 
tential reality  of  the  spiritual  world.  But 
religious  faith  gives  life  substance  and 
stability  and  steadies  the  soul  with  consola- 
tion and  assurance. 

A  Dynamic  of  Religious  Labor 

Prayer  produces  action.  We  cannot  pray 
with  any  real  sincerity  and  earnestness 
without  getting  hold  of  serious  convictions 
of  duty.  These  convictions  become  the  spur 
of  endeavor.  The  prayer  for  the  realization 
of  ends  suggests  action  in  the  direction  of 
the  attainment  of  those  ends.  The  con- 
templation of  high  values  suggests  effort 
toward  the  realization  of  those  values. 
Prayer  has  often  been  the  origin  of  mission- 
ary zeal  or  moral  passion  for  reforms  or 


74     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

schemes  for  the  organization  of  rehgious 
forces.  The  zealots  in  any  moral  cause  are 
usually  men  of  prayer.  Prayer  produces 
what  Carlyle  called  Oliver  Cromwell,  the 
"practical  mystic."  This  is  the  man  who 
goes  from  the  place  of  communion  with  his 
God  into  the  world  of  action.  Some  men  are 
able,  or  seem  able,  to  give  themselves  in 
passionless  contemplation  of  the  true  and 
good  and  beautiful,  but  they  are  the  excep- 
tion. More  often  they  break  away  from  their 
cloistered  place  of  prayer  filled  with  the 
passion  for  service  and  reform.  Saint 
Francis  and  Augustine,  Savonarola  and 
Luther  are  examples. 

And  prayer  brings  fresh  inspiration  and 
renewed  strength  for  flagging  energies  and 
faltering  feet.  The  prophet  discovered  that 
in  the  long  ago  and  sang  of  his  discovery: 
"They  that  wait  on  the  Lord  shall  renew 
their  strength;  they  shall  mount  up  with 
wings  as  eagles;  they  shall  run,  and  not  be 
weary;  and  they  shall  walk  and  not  faint." 
How  often  did  the  Great  Galilsean  go  apart 
into  the  quiet  place,  after  virtue  had  gone 
out  of  him  in  ministry,  and  weary  with  the 
burden  of  the  sin  of  the  world,  to  find  the 


SUBJECTIVE    EFFECTS       75 

restoration  of  spent  forces  and  the  recupera- 
tion of  weakened  vitality  in  the  exercise  of 
prayer!  And  he  went  from  the  place  of 
prayer  and  with  new  strength  back  to  his 
task  of  service.  In  the  facing  of  trying 
ordeals  and  the  assumption  of  heavy  re- 
sponsibilities the  Master  set  the  example  of 
preparing  himself  by  prayer. 

A  Transformer  of  Life  and  Character 

A  thing  that  was  hinted  at  in  another 
connection  deserves  fuller  consideration  in 
this  connection.  That  is  the  character- 
making  and  life-transforming  power  of 
prayer.  One  cannot  hold  in  contemplation 
sublime  interests  and  high  spiritual  ideals 
without  undergoing  a  sea-change  into  the 
likeness  of  these  things.  That  is  doubtless 
the  reason  that  Paul  wrote  that  wonderfully 
expressive  admonition  to  one  of  the 
churches,  "Finally,  brethren,  whatsoever 
things  are  true,  whatsoever  things  are 
honest,  whatsoever  things  are  just,  whatso- 
ever things  are  pure,  whatsoever  things  are 
lovely,  whatsoever  things  are  of  good  report; 
if  there  be  any  virtue,  and  if  there  be  any 
praise,  think  on  these  things."   There  is  no 


76     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

more  effective  method  of  idealization  and  of 
the  subhmation  of  things  lofty  and  spiritual 
than  the  method  of  prayer.  One  cannot 
pray  earnestly  and  sincerely  for  spiritual 
ends  without  becoming  spiritual.  One  can- 
not contemplate  his  own  ideal  of  God  with- 
out being  lifted  to  a  higher  plane  ot 
character  and  life  by  that  very  contempla- 
tion. 

These  subjective  benefits  may  arise  from 
the  exercise  of  prayer  whether  God  has  a 
real  existence  or  not.  All  that  is  necessary 
for  the  realization  of  these  effects  is  a  belief 
in  God  on  the  part  of  the  one  who  does  the 
praying.  It  is  my  conviction  that  this  belief 
is  necessary  to  give  prayer  substance  and 
sincerity.  Later  we  shall  take  up  the  con- 
sideration of  the  existence  of  a  God  to  whom 
prayer  may  be  made  and  the  character  of 
that  God.  We  have  been  paving  the  way 
for  that  discussion. 


PART  II 
PRAYER  AS  A  COSMIC  FACT 


CHAPTER  V 

PRAYER  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER 

Every  Man's  Need  of  a  Philosophy 

Professor  Borden  P.  Bowne  had  a  say- 
ing that  "philosophy  is  not  everybody's 
business."  That  may  be  true  when  we  think 
of  the  matter  in  terms  of  the  general  quali- 
fication for  a  study  of  the  subject;  but 
everybody  has  a  philosophy,  just  the  same, 
however  crude  and  loose  jointed  it  may  be. 
Also  it  is  true  that  the  dominant  moods  of 
thought  of  any  given  time  exert  a  profound 
influence  upon  the  whole  life  of  that  time, 
even  upon  the  people  who  have  little  under- 
standing of  these  dominant  opinions  or  any 
direct  interest  in  them.  Not  only  must  men 
have  a  philosophy  of  religion,  but  the  cur- 
rent and  dominant  philosophies,  and  even 
outworn  philosophies  of  another  day,  will 
leave  their  mark  upon  their  religious  think- 
ing and  religious  life.  Philosophy  is  there- 
fore not  so  far  removed  from  the  realm  of 
the  practical  as  is  popularly  supposed. 
79 


80     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

The  Problems  of  Prayer 

The  problems  of  prayer  are  problems  of 
philosophy.  The  questions  that  are  raised 
are  beyond  the  subjects  that  have  been  con- 
sidered in  making  a  study  of  prayer  as  a 
psychological  fact.  This  study  is  a  matter 
of  philosophy  in  a  certain  sense,  but  only  the 
outer  court  of  philosophy,  the  way  of  ap- 
proach to  the  heart  of  the  subject.  Com- 
paratively no  real  problem  or  serious  diffi- 
culty has  presented  itself.  We  have  been 
seeking  to  interpret  the  data  of  experience, 
and  questions  have  arisen  here  and  there; 
but,  in  comparison  with  the  questions  we 
have  been  approaching,  they  are  simple  and 
even  superficial.  They  are  within  the  whole 
scope  of  prayer  philosophy,  but,  in  a  sense, 
introductory  to  the  main  questions.  The 
main  questions  are  these:  What  kind  of  a 
universe  will  have  a  place  for  prayer?  How 
can  there  be  a  place  for  prayer  in  a  universe 
of  law.?  What  is  God  like?  Has  God  any 
power  of  response?  If  God  is  all-wise  and 
knows  better  than  we  do  what  we  ought  to 
have,  and  is  lovingly  willing  to  give  us 
everything  we  need,  why  pray  at  all?  If  God 
foreknows  all  things  and  has  planned  all 


PRAYER  AND  WORLD  ORDER  81 

things  according  to  his  wisdom,  how  can 
prayer  change  anything?  Can  prayer  be 
anything  more  than  reverent  submission  or 
surrender  to  the  inevitable?  Has  prayer  any 
further  meaning  than  a  subjective  meaning 
or  any  further  eflFects  than  subjective 
effects?  These  are  the  questions  of  difficulty 
that  inevitably  arise  and  the  answers  we 
give  to  these  questions  will  determine  our 
subsequent  religious  attitude. 

The  World  Ground 

The  main  category  of  human  thinking  is 
the  category  of  cause.  This  is  the  main 
question  of  philosophy.  What  is  the  nature 
of  the  cause  of  all  things?  The  answer  to 
that  question  will  have  a  great  deal  to  do 
with  our  notion  of  prayer  as  a  means  for 
accomplishing  results  in  the  world  outside 
our  own  minds. 

The  materialists  hold  that  all  causation  is 
mechanical.  The  universe  consists  of  matter 
in  motion.  The  sum  total  of  all  reality  is 
matter  in  motion.  Causation  is  linear,  the 
action  of  part  on  part.  Consciousness  has 
no  efficiency.  It  is  a  sort  of  accompaniment 
to  the  process  of  reality,  an  unexplained  and 


82     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

inexplicable  appearance  in  the  process.  It 
has  no  more  to  do  with  the  ongoing  of  the 
universe  than  the  squeaking  of  wagon 
wheels  or  the  rattle  of  those  wheels  on  the 
pavement  has  to  do  with  the  propelling  of 
the  wagon.  Consciousness  is  always  an 
effect  and  never  a  cause.  It  is  an  epiphenom- 
enon.  It  is  a  curious  and  troublesome  fact 
for  the  mechanistic  explanation  of  the 
universe.  In  linear  causation  the  effect  in 
turn  becomes  the  cause  of  the  next  step  in 
the  mechanical  process,  the  connecting  link 
in  the  chain  of  causation.  Here  is  an  effect 
that  does  not  enter  into  the  process,  though 
it  may  seem  to  itself  to  do  so.  The  epiphe- 
nomenon  is  an  invention  for  the  purpose  of  ex- 
plaining this  overbubbling  aspect  of  nature. 
It  is  a  desperate  expedient.  The  explanation 
has  never  quite  explained.  The  effort  is  to 
keep  the  power  of  intelligence  from  having 
a  place  in  the  processes  of  nature.  The 
moment  intelligence  becomes  a  causal  force 
the  mechanical  explanation  of  things  is 
smashed.  Something  else  than  matter  in 
motion  has  been  admitted  as  a  factor  in  the 
process  and  as  a  part  of  basic  reality. 


PRAYER  AND  WORLD  ORDER    83 

Mechanism 

It  is  easily  seen  that  the  only  place  for  a 
God  to  act  upon  a  mechanical  process  is  at 
the  beginning,  to  set  the  process  going.  God 
could  be  conceived  as  starting  the  process 
in  the  same  way  that  a  mechanic  would 
start  a  clock  and  let  it  go  until  it  should  run 
down.  The  thoroughgoing  materialist  would 
not  acknowledge  such  a  causative  power 
over  and  above  the  material  universe.  And 
if  this  causative  power  were  anything  dif- 
ferent from  the  factors  in  the  mechanical 
process  making  up  the  universe  and  its 
movement — if  it  be  thought  of  as  intelli- 
gence— he  could  not  admit  it  into  his  sysr 
tem.  Therefore  there  is  no  chance  for  intel- 
ligence to  bring  about  any  changes  in  the 
ongoing  of  the  universe.  Our  desires  and  our 
purposes  might  seem  to  enter  into  the 
scheme  of  things,  but  it  would  be  only  a 
seeming.  In  a  universe  governed  by  me- 
chanical causation  the  efficacy  of  prayer  or 
of  any  other  effort  of  intelligence  could  be 
nothing  more  than  an  illusion. 

Teleology 

The  conception  that  is  usually  thought  of 


84     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

as  being  in  direct  contrast  with  the  concep- 
tion of  the  world  as  a  mechanism  governed 
by  an  indifferent  mechanical  impulse  is  the 
teleological  conception,  which  regards  the 
world  process  as  the  working  out  of  a  pur- 
pose. The  antithesis  is  not  so  complete 
as  it  seems  to  be,  for  a  machine  is  normally 
explained  in  terms  of  purpose.  The  ma- 
terialist simply  refuses  to  think  of  an  ante- 
cedent cause  back  of  the  world  of  matter  in 
motion.  But  the  emphasis  of  the  teleological 
conception  is  on  the  future,  the  realization 
of  an  end  toward  which  all  things  are  tend- 
ing, rather  than  an  emphasis  upon  the 
source  from  whence  all  things  proceed. 
Modern  philosophy  has  been  greatly  in- 
fluenced, even  revolutionized,  by  the  evolu- 
tionary hypothesis,  which  regards  the  world 
process  as  a  process  of  development.  It  is  a 
perfectly  natural  corollary  to  regard  this 
process  as  a  process  of  the  realization  of 
values.  This  means  that  the  world  is  pulled 
forward  in  the  direction  of  the  achievement 
of  ends.  It  becomes  a  living  world  in  the 
process  of  the  realization  of  life's  values. 
Intelligence  and  purpose  cannot  be  left  out 
of  this  sort  of  philosophy. 


PRAYER  AND  WORLD  ORDER  85 

Things  are  more  favorable  to  prayer  in 
this  sort  of  world.  But  let  us  not  proceed 
too  rapidly  and  draw  an  unwarranted  con- 
clusion. A  world  purpose,  grounded  in  a 
Cosmic  Mind,  does  not  guarantee  us  a  ra- 
tional basis  for  the  objective  efficacy  of 
prayer.  Such  a  purpose  might  shut  the 
world  process  against  change  just  as  effec- 
tively as  the  inexorable  laws  of  mechanical 
causation.  If  the  purpose  is  complete  in 
every  respect,  if  the  whole  scheme  has  been 
laid  out  to  the  last  detail,  nothing  we  can 
do  will  change  anything  about  it.  Every- 
thing is  predetermined.  We  must  make  our 
prayers,  however  futile  they  may  be,  be- 
cause they  are  ground  out  as  details  of  a 
world  plan.  We  must  proceed  further  in  our 
thinking  than  mere  teleology  if  we  find  a 
place  for  the  cosmic  efficacy  of  the  human 
will. 

The  only  kind  of  universe  that  will  give 
prayer  or  any  other  human  eflPort  a  real 
meaning  for  the  realization  of  values  is  the 
universe  that  admits  us  as  real  factors  into 
the  world  process.  This  idea  suggests  an- 
other kind  of  causation,  that  which  Pro- 
fessor  Hobhouse   calls   organic   causation. 


86     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

The  causal  energy  is  generated  within  the 
cosmic  process.  Hobhouse  regards  the  cos- 
mic process  as  the  development  of  Mind. 
Professor  Bowne  stated  the  matter  another 
way  when  he  said  that  the  world  is  funda- 
mentally personal  and  is  about  the  business 
of  the  development  and  realization  of  per- 
sonal life.  He  regards  the  world  ground  as 
personal  and  all  the  meanings  of  the  uni- 
verse as  centering  in  personal  existences. 

Organic  Causation 

According  to  this  view  of  causation,  the 
personal  being,  such  as  you  or  I,  with  a 
thinking  mind  may  generate  fresh  energy 
and  make  original  and  unpredetermined 
contributions  to  the  cosmic  process.  Per- 
sonal life  has  that  power.  It  is  not  fastened 
down  by  the  limits  of  mechanical  necessity. 
This  is  the  creative  capacity.  Bergson  puts 
the  idea  of  life's  creative  function  into  his 
philosophy  in  Creative  Evolution,  without 
the  emphasis  that  Bowne  puts  on  personal- 
ism.  If  creation  is  admitted  anywhere,  then 
the  whole  world  process  may  be  grounded  in 
the  creative  energy  of  a  Supreme  Personal 
Being, 


PRAYER  AND  WORLD  ORDER  87 

Now,  experience  seems  to  show  that  we 
do  have  causative  force  within  us,  that  our 
personal  lives  are  fountains  from  which  pro- 
ceed fresh  streams  of  creative  energy.  And 
the  tendency  of  modern  philosophy  is  to 
take  the  testimony  of  experience  very 
seriously.  The  old  dialectic  method  is  dying 
hard,  but  it  is  very  surely  giving  way  under 
the  influence  of  the  evolutionary  hypothesis. 
The  supreme  contribution  of  this  doctrine  is 
the  idea  of  life  as  the  fundamental  fact  of 
existence.  Making  the  world  process  the 
process  of  harmonizing  living  beings  with 
environment,  it  puts  life  at  the  very  heart 
of  reality.  In  the  tendency  of  evolutionary 
theory  to  regard  the  cosmic  process,  in  its 
higher  phases  and  more  advanced  develop- 
ment, as  a  process  of  realizing  values,  we 
find  the  suggestion  of  intelligent  purpose. 
It  is  leading  us  out  of  the  dreary  wastes  of 
static  monism,  while  at  the  same  time  it 
brings  us  to  see  that  all  things  are  held  to- 
gether in  the  unity  of  a  world  process.  We 
shall  not  come  to  a  larger  knowledge  of  our 
world  by  adopting  some  guiding  notions  and 
seeking  to  make  all  things  conform  con- 
sistently  with   these  notions.      We  shall, 


88    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

rather,  take  the  world  as  we  find  it  and  by 
experience,  by  reflection,  by  constant  criti- 
cism of  our  own  methods  of  procedure  gain 
what  knowledge  we  may  of  the  world  in 
which  we  find  ourselves. 

The  world  which  we  see  about  us,  as  far 
as  we  are  able  to  form  an  opinion,  is  a  world 
that  has  some  things  fixed  and  some  things 
changing,  a  world  that  has  some  mechanism 
and  some  teleology,  some  necessity  and 
some  freedom,  some  order  and  some  confu- 
sion, some  law  and  apparently  some  caprice. 
And  experience  gives  us  the  testimony  that 
we  are  in  the  world  and  have  something  to 
do  with  its  ongoing.  We  have  been  able  to 
modify  it,  and  it  has  modified  us.  No  phi- 
losophy has  been  able  successfully  to  refute 
this  testimony  of  our  own  consciousness. 
And  any  philosophy  that  starts  out  to 
ignore  it  labels  itself  in  the  outset  as  un- 
satisfactory. 

If  we  are  personal  factors  in  a  world  proc- 
ess, human  effort  and  human  desire  have  a 
cosmic  significance.  We  cannot  do  every- 
thing. Our  desires  are  not  omnipotent.  But 
we  are  not  mere  helpless  spectators  watching 
the  wheels  of  the  world  go  round.    This  is 


PRAYER  AND  WORLD  ORDER  89 

where  a  place  for  prayer  may  be  found  in 
philosophy.  In  a  personal  world  prayer  may 
conceivably  be  a  cosmic  factor. 

Prayer  and  Law 

The  opponents  of  religion  have  made  an 
miwarranted  use  of  the  scientific  discovery 
of  the  practically  universal  reign  of  law. 
Popular  thinking  has  given  way  entirely  too 
far  to  some  of  the  assumptions  that  have 
discredited  many  of  the  precious  tenets  of 
rehgious  faith.  Too  much  has  been  admitted 
of  these  assumptions.  Nothing  has  been 
more  chilling  and  deadening  to  the  faith  of 
the  common  man  in  the  power  of  prayer 
than  this  teaching  of  the  reign  of  universal 
law.  It  should  not  have  had  that  effect  at 
all. 

The  modern  man  thinks  of  the  vast  out- 
reach of  the  universe  about  him,  the  vast 
multitude  of  solar  systems  with  their 
myriads  of  planets,  the  seemingly  infinite 
distances  that  stretch  from  star  to  star,  and 
thinks  of  the  whole  as  under  the  sway  of 
inexorable  law.  Then  he  asks,  "WTiat  is  the 
use  to  pray?"  He  feels  lost  with  his  little 
desires  in  a  vast  indifferent  universe.    It  is 


90    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

the  old  question,  "What  is  man,  that  thou 
art  mindful  of  him?"  The  modern  man 
takes  his  microscope  and  studies  the  uni- 
verse of  infinitesimals,  and  there  he  dis- 
covers still  the  reign  of  law.  Cause  and 
effect  have  the  same  relations  in  that  world 
as  in  the  world  of  big  things.  If  he  turns  his 
mind  inward  upon  itself,  he  finds  the  laws 
of  physiology  and  psychology  and  logic 
operating  there.  The  universe  gives  him 
everywhere  the  impression  that  it  is  a  per- 
fectly organized,  perfectly  working  system. 
There  seems  to  be  no  suggestion  of  the 
possibility  of  the  injection  of  personal  desire 
into  this  universe  that  operates  with  the 
precision  of  a  steam  roller.  He  loses  sight  of 
the  irregularities  and  the  exceptions.  His 
mind  becomes  filled  with  universals.  There 
is  no  encouragement  for  prayer.  He  can 
contemplate  and  admire,  but  he  finds  no 
direct  response  to  his  feelings  or  his  desires. 
Also  he  has  in  the  background  of  his 
thinking  the  explanations  of  religion  almost 
entirely  in  terms  of  miracle.  The  Bible  has 
stated  religious  experience  in  a  natural  way 
without  question  or  explanation.  It  is  not 
a  scientific  treatise,  but  a  book  of  life.  It  was 


PRAYER  AND  WORLD  ORDER  91 

written  before  the  reign  of  law  was  a  gen- 
erally accepted  fact.  There  are  hints  here 
and  there  that  the  Scripture  writers  have 
by  inspiration  grasped  the  idea.  Paul  has 
it  quite  clearly.  But  it  is  nowhere  stated  in 
such  terms  as  express  it  in  our  modern  day. 
Hence  the  average  man  is  likely  to  jump  to 
the  conclusion  that  the  discoveries  of  science 
have  discredited  the  Bible  and  put  out  of 
date  many  of  the  fundamental  practices  and 
beliefs  of  religion.  A  belief  in  the  efficacy 
of  prayer  has  departed  in  this  way. 

If  the  idea  of  the  universal  reign  of  law 
had  been  properly  related  to  religious  ideas 
in  the  popular  mind,  men  would  have  seen 
that  law  is  friendly,  and  not  unfriendly,  to 
religion.  They  would  have  seen  that  law  is 
essential  to  the  stability  and  reliability  of 
the  universe.  Without  it  life  could  have  no 
substantiality,  truth  no  certainty,  and  mor- 
ality and  spirituality  no  assured  progress. 
Law  is  the  manifestation  of  regularity  and 
dependability  in  our  world.  It  has  no 
causative  power.  It  is  the  method  by  which 
causative  power  operates.  It  is  the  observed 
order  in  which  phenomena  hang  together. 
Without  it  we  should  have  complete  chaos. 


92     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

Law  does  not  bind  or  enslave  life.  It  is 
by  the  use  of  law  that  living  beings  gain  a 
larger  and  larger  mastery  over  the  world 
of  things.  By  means  of  the  laws  of  nature 
we  are  able  to  get  control  over  the  forces  of 
nature  and  make  them  serve  the  human  will. 

"One  ship  sails  east 
And  one  sails  west 

By  the  self-same  wind  that  blows: 
It  is  the  set  of  the  sail  ^ 

And  not  the  gale 

That  determines  the  way  it  goes." 

By  means  of  the  laws  of  mental  development 
and  of  reason  man  is  able  to  make  intellec- 
tual progress  and  to  accumulate  the  results 
of  learning.  By  means  of  the  laws  of  life 
man  is  able  to  achieve  moral  and  spiritual 
progress.  There  is  nothing  in  the  operation 
of  law  that  interferes  with  proper  personal 
freedom  and  the  development  of  personal 
life  in  any  sphere,  in  relation  to  God  or  any 
other  relation.  The  fact  of  law,  however, 
must  be  taken  into  account.  But  if  we  have 
a  personal  relation  with  a  personal  God,  the 
reign  of  law  will  not  prevent  our  communion 
and  fellowship  with  him  any  more  than 
with  other  persons.  It  will  govern  our  inter- 


PRAYER  AND  WORLD  ORDER  93 

course  with  God  in  much  the  same  way  that 
it  governs  our  intercourse  with  other  per- 
sons. 

The  Laws  of  Prayer 

The  last  conclusion  brings  us  to  a  consid- 
eration of  the  laws  of  prayer.  Prayer  must 
conform  to  law.  Among  the  cosmic  forces 
is  the  prayer  force;  and,  as  these  do  not 
operate  accidentally  or  in  obedience  to  whim 
or  caprice,  so  we  may  expect  prayer  to  have 
regulating  principles.  God  is  about  the 
business  of  establishing  a  harmony  of  forces 
in  the  universe.  Therefore  we  must  not 
expect  that  inJSuence  which  deals  directly 
and  immediately  with  him  to  be  left  out  of 
the  realm  of  orderly  processes  and  methods 
and  out  from  under  the  sovereignty  of  law. 

The  cardinal  law  of  prayer,  as  Dr.  Charles 
E.  Jefferson  has  pointed  out,  is  the  law  of 
limitations.  There  are  many  things  included 
in  prayer  petitions  that  have  no  place  there. 
There  are  things  in  this  world  that  no  * 
amount  of  prayer  can  change.  Prayer  will 
not  change  the  operation  of  the  law  of  the 
harvest.  Prayer  will  not  alter  the  courses  of 
the  stars.     Prayer  will  not  substitute  for 


94     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

work.  Prayer  will  not  take  the  place  of 
thinking.  Prayer  will  not  operate  outside 
its  normal  sphere.  It  is  a  force  that  operates 
along  with  kindred  spiritual  forces. 

Prayer  must  conform  to  the  fundamental 
/  laws  of  life;  it  must  not  try  to  run  ahead  of 
the  working  out  of  God's  main  purpose.  It 
obeys  the  law  of  proportion.  The  whole 
course  of  the  cosmic  process  will  not  be  set 
aside  merely  to  gratify  the  irrelevant  desires 
of  individuals.  Our  personal  desires  might 
never  be  attained  by  any  other  method  than 
prayer,  many  of  them  might  not;  but  those 
desires,  whatever  they  are,  must  fit  into 
God's  main  plan. 
/  Above  all,  prevaiUng  prayer  must  con- 
form to  moral  law.  Many  of  our  prayers  do 
not  do  that.  Sometimes  they  are  selfish, 
sometimes  vindictive,  sometimes  vicious. 
As  such,  they  are  pathetically  futile  and  in- 
effective. Moreover,  they  are  ignorant  and 
unworthy. 

Prayer  is  one  form  of  spiritual  power 
among  others.  It  has  its  normal  part  and 
portion  in  life.  It  should  come  into  relation 
with  the  other  spiritual  factors  of  life  and 
with  the  world  process  as  a  whole.  Giving  it 


PRAYER  AND  WORLD  ORDER  95 

larger  powers  than  it  rightfully  possesses 
will  discredit  it,  perhaps  entirely,  and  turn 
men  from  its  practice.  It  should  be  the 
effort  of  religious  philosophy  to  give  prayer 
its  exact  value.  It  is  one  form  of  influence 
that  is  exerted  by  a  personal  being  in  a  world 
that  is  grounded  in  a  personal  cause  that  has 
for  its  main  business  the  development  of 
personal  life  and  the  realization  of  values 
which  can  have  meaning  only  for  personal 
minds. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  GOD  OF  PRAYER 

Nothing  is  so  important  for  the  religious 
life  of  men  as  their  conception  of  God.  No 
matter  whether  they  have  an  adequate 
philosophy  of  the  world  or  not,  if  they  can 
retain  a  vital  and  real  faith  in  God,  their 
religion  will  remain  a  vital  and  real  thing  in 
their  lives.  There  has  been  more  or  less 
tragedy  connected  with  the  whole  course  of 
human  development,  but  none  more  real 
than  the  spiritual  tragedy  of  readjustment 
that  has  been  enacted  with  increasing  in- 
tensity since  the  beginning  of  the  Renais- 
sance. And  it  seems  such  a  useless  tragedy, 
as  useless  as  the  fearful  carnage  of  the  last 
great  World  War.  It  is  the  result  of  the  lack 
of  proportion  in  thinking,  the  one-track 
tendency  of  the  human  mind,  the  failure  to 
keep  properly  related  in  a  course  of  develop- 
ment the  cardinal  aspects  of  life.  The 
tragedy  is  the  loss  of  God  out  of  the  lives  of 
an  increasing  number  of  thoughtful  people. 
96 


THE   GOD  OF  PRAYER       97 

The  Tragedy  of  the  Loss  of  God 

Dr.  R.  L.  Swain,  in  his  new  book,  What 
and  Where  is  God?  quotes  the  wife  of  a  min- 
ister concerning  her  loss  of  the  consciousness 
of  God.  She  said  to  him  at  the  dinner  table: 
*'I  have  no  God !  They  have  taken  him  away 
and  I  do  not  know  where  to  find  him.  My 
childhood  conception  of  a  Man-God  on  the 
throne  of  heaven  is  gone — and  I  think 
rightly  gone ;  but  I  have  nothing  to  take  its 
place.  I  hear  them  speak  of  an  immanent 
God;  of  a  God  who  fills  all  nature.  And  I 
have  no  objection  to  this  except  that  it 
brings  no  relief.  Nature  is  so  inexpressibly 
vast  and  complex  that,  to  my  mind,  a  God 
who  fills  all  nature  is  so  infinitely  big  and 
spread  out  that  I  can  neither  know  him  nor 
love  him.  He  is  altogether  too  attenuated 
for  me;  besides,  this  makes  him  so  much 
everywhere  that  he  seems  to  be  nowhere. 
Here  I  am  without  a  God,  working  myself 
nearly  to  death  in  a  great  church;  and  my 
heart  is  breaking  for  a  Father  to  whom  I 
can  go,  as  I  once  did,  with  all  my  hopes 
and  fears.  Moreover,  all  my  young  women 
friends  feel  as  I  do.  We  often  speak  of  this 
among  ourselves  without  knowing  where  to 


98     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

turn  for  relief."^   Here  is  voiced  the  spiritual 
tragedy  of  our  time. 

Causes  of  this  Condition 

This  has  resulted,  in  the  first  place,  from 
the  fact  that  the  earlier  crude  conceptions  of 
,  God  have  remained  largely  in  an  undevel- 
oped state  or  they  have  failed  to  keep  pace 
in  their  development  with  the  remainder  of 
the  intellectual  life.  When  the  average  per- 
son has  awakened  to  this  discrepancy,  he 
has  sought  to  rectify  matters.  The  easiest 
way  is  simply  to  lop  off  by  a  sort  of  intel- 
lectual amputation  the  deformed  and  dis- 
figuring religious  ideas.  He  decides  that  in 
the  whole  matter  of  his  earlier  religious  life 
he  has  been  the  victim  of  superstition. 

Another  cause  of  the  giving  up  of  God  is 
the  fact  that  the  early  forms  of  picturing 
God's  relation  to  man  in  terms  of  prevailing 
human  relations,  and  the  falling  into  the 
discard  of  those  relations  has  brought  a  re- 
jection of  the  conception  of  God  that  has 
been  connected  with  the  discard.  No  new 
conception  was  at  hand  to  take  its  place.  It 

^  Reprinted,  by  permission  of  The  Macmillan  Company, 
from  What  and  Where  Is  God?  Copyright,  1920,  by  The 
Macmillan  Company. 


THE   GOD  OF  PRAYER       99 

has  been  a  ease  of  throwing  away  the  baby 
with  the  bath.    For  example,  in  earher  the- 
ological thought  God  was  represented  as  a 
monarch.   He  was  the  supreme  autocrat  of 
the  universe.     Hence,  when  autocracy  be- 
came generally  distasteful,  men  decided  that 
it  was  time  also  to  throw  away  the  idea  of 
God,   never    going    into    the    question    of 
whether  their  long-time  conception  of  God 
might  be  illogical  or  unjust.     Dr.  Albert 
Parker  Fitch  has  a  striking  quotation  from 
Dr.  Harry  Allen  Overstreet,  which  furnishes 
an    excellent    illustration    of    this    sort   of 
reasoning.    Dr.  Overstreet  says:  "There  is 
no  place  in  the  future  for  an  eternally  per- 
fect being  and  no  need.    Society,  democratic 
from  end  to  end,  can  brook  no  such  radical 
class  distinction  as  that  between  a  supreme 
being,  favored  with  eternal   and  absolute 
perfection,  and  the  mass  of  beings  doomed 
to  the  lower  ways  of  imperfect  struggle."^ 
Having  known  Dr.  Overstreet  personally 
and  having  engaged  in  discussions  with  him, 
I  know  that  he  has  a  perfect  passion  for 
getting  rid  of  God.    I  believe  he  has  other 

^Preaching  and  Paganism,  p.  59.  Yale  University  Press, 
publishers. 


100    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

motives  than  the  democratic  motive.  How- 
ever, he  has  discovered  and  made  use  of 
an  idea  which  may  not  be  so  clearly  de- 
fined in  the  popular  mind,  yet  is  certainly 
there. 

Also  I  think  the  modern  man  has  turned 
from  God  because  of  the  abstract  character 
of  much  of  the  theological  thought  of  the 
past,  which  has  tended  to  lift  God  out  of  life 
and  experience  and  preclude  a  growing 
knowledge  of  him  by  setting  the  barriers  of 
a  priori  notions  across  the  path  of  experien- 
tial discovery. 

Historic  Conceptions  of  God  and  Their 
Influence 

Finally,  we  must  take  into  consideration 
the  various  philosophic  conceptions  of  God 
that  have  been  the  products  of  reflection, 
and  each  has  contributed  its  greater  or 
smaller  portion  of  truth,  but  has  failed  to 
satisfy.  And  every  one  of  them  has  set  the 
stamp  of  its  influence  strongly  and  clearly 
upon  religious  opinion.  These  historic  con- 
ceptions have  given  men  definite  ways  to 
think  about  God,  definite  points  of  de- 
parture, turned  their  thoughts  into  definite 


THE  GOD  OF  PRAYER      101 

channels,  and  handicapped  thinking  with 
the  defects  belonging  to  each. 

Deism 

Not  least  in  its  inlfluence  has  been  the 
deistic  conception.  This  is  a  conception  of 
two  distinct  orders,  the  natural  and  the 
supernatural.  God  is  relegated  to  the  realm 
of  the  supernatural.  As  related  to  the  uni- 
verse, he  is  the  Deus  ex  machina,  an  absentee 
God.  Although  many  skeptics — Voltaire, 
Rousseau,  and  Ingersoll  among  them — ^have 
been  champions  of  the  deistic  opinion,  and 
although  it  has  been  generally  recognized  as 
being  opposed  to  the  theology  of  the  church, 
yet  it  has  exercised  a  strong  influence  upon 
religious  thinking.  Paley's  illustration  of 
the  watch  and  the  watchmaker  has  a  deistic 
flavor.  Popular  thought  was  for  many 
generations  after  the  English  deists  literally 
saturated  with  deism.  It  is  primitive  and 
superficial  enough  to  make  an  instant  appeal 
to  unreflective  common  sense. 

Pantheism 

Over  against  the  idea  of  the  absentee  God 
was  placed  the  doctrine  of  the  divine  im- 


102     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

manence.  In  the  later  years  it  has  almost 
swung  theology  into  pantheism.  The 
thought  of  God  as  immanent  in  all  nature 
and  in  all  life,  constantly  furnishing  the 
energy  for  all  movement  and  all  growth,  has 
led  people  into  identifying  God  with  nature. 
When  they  have  not  done  this  many  of  them 
have  taken  the  reverse  course  and  identified 
nature  with  God  in  an  idealistic  pantheism. 
The  whole  world,  with  all  its  monstrosities, 
is  a  thought  world.  That  thought  is  God's 
thought.  God  as  a  mental  fact  is  the  sum 
total  of  existence.  All  else,  even  our  own 
individuality,  is  illusory.  Sin  is  illusory. 
Evil  is  illusory.  Our  own  personal  existence 
is  illusory.  Christian  Science  is  a  striking 
illustration  of  this  sort  of  pantheism.  Any 
form  of  pantheism  is  killing  to  the  devo- 
tional spirit  and  to  active  religious  faith.  In 
the  act  of  prayer  the  worship  is  no  longer 
conceived  of  as  communion  between  per- 
sons. In  atheism  you  have  a  human  world 
that  is  Godless.  In  pantheism  you  have  a 
divine  world  from  which  the  reality  of  hu- 
man life  has  been  excluded.  It  is  diflScult  to 
say  which  is  worse.  There  can  be  no  prayer, 
in  any  real  sense  of  the  term,  without  a 


THE  GOD  OF  PRAYER      103 

divine    and    human    person    in    intercom- 
munication. 

Absolutism 

Another  bhghting  conception,  very  much 
akin  to  pantheism,  is  the  doctrine  of  the 
Absolute,  that  has  had  a  large  place  in  both 
philosophy  and  theology.  The  doctrine  of 
the  Absolute  is  found  in  its  most  extreme 
form  in  the  writings  of  Bradley,  Mansell, 
and  Sir  William  Hamilton,  and  in  the  sys- 
tem of  Hegel,  but  it  is  not  without  its  queer 
twists  in  many  of  the  arguments  of  abstract 
orthodox  theology.  The  Absolute  is  the 
supreme  accomplishment  of  dialectic  acting 
independently  of  experience.  It  is  the  carry- 
ing forward  of  the  Ideal  until  the  moral 
world,  individuality,  responsive  feeling  and 
action,  all  definite  attributes,  all  finitely 
conceived  qualities  of  character,  have  been 
transcended.  The  perfections  of  God  are  so 
complete  that  he  is  lifted  into  the  realm  of 
the  unthinkable,  unknowable,  and  unap- 
proachable. He  is  lifted  utterly  out  of  con- 
tact with  all  human  life.  He  has  no  rehgious 
utility  or  value.  He  is  as  intelligible  as  the 
figure  representing  infinity,  and  the  figure 


104     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

representing  infinity  is  about  as  intelligible 
as  the  oval  representation  of  nothing.  God 
can  mean  nothing  for  us  religiously  unless 
he  can  get  into  our  own  world,  the  world  of 
the  same  moral  and  intellectual  laws,  the 
world  that  has  values  conceivably  realizable. 
"There  is,  however,  a  valid  meaning 
which  the  word  Absolute  may  have  when 
apphed  to  God.  God  is  Absolute  in  that  he 
is  the  unconditioned  Ground  of  all  finite 
existences,  and  is  only  limited  in  so  far  as 
he  limits  himself  in  the  world  which  he  has 
created.  God  may,  therefore,  be  appro- 
priately designated  as  the  Absolute  Ground 
of  the  world,  for  he  is  the  sole  and  sufficient 
reason  for  its  existence.  He  may  also  be 
called  Absolute  because  he  is  a  being  har- 
monious and  self-complete,  whose  con- 
sciousness embraces  the  whole  universe.  But 
Absolute  in  the  theistic  acceptation  of  the 
word  is  definitely  distinguished  from  the 
speculative  Absolute  which  is  the  sum  of 
reality."! 

Modern  Philosophy 

Modern  philosophy  is  making  an  effort  to 

1  Galloway's  Philosophy  of  Religion,  p.  481.     Scribners. 


THE   GOD  OF  PRAYER      105 

get  away  from  the  helplessly  perfect  God 
that  has  been  created  by  the  operations  of 
theological  and  philosophical  dialectic.  An 
effort  scarcely  philosophical  is  that  of  H.  G. 
Wells  in  his  book  that  provoked  a  wide  and 
somewhat  acrimonious  discussion,  God,  the 
Invisible  King.  It  was  a  sort  of  bomb  in  the 
camp  of  absolutists.  Mr.  Wells  was  hunting 
for  a  God,  groping  for  him  in  the  dark,  who 
would  meet  the  religious  needs  of  a  hu- 
manity under  the  affliction  of  a  World  War. 
His  God  is  a  finite  God,  not  perfect,  but 
striving  for  perfection,  not  in  complete 
control  of  the  universe,  but  sufficiently 
strong  in  his  influence  to  be  regarded  as  a 
gradually  prevailing  power  that  makes  for 
righteousness. 

Professor  William  James  in  some  of  his 
writings  has  contended  for  a  finite  God.  His 
chief  difficulty  with  the  absolutist's  concep- 
tion is  its  negation  of  moral  responsibility. 
He  is  seeking  to  find  a  God  who  is  not 
responsible  for  the  sin  and  evil  in  the  world, 
and  he  also  seeks  to  find  a  place  for  the 
freedom  and  moral  responsibility  of  the 
individual.  He  sees  clearly  the  hard  scheme 
of  determinism  involved  in  the  absolutist's 


106     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

conception  of  God.  He  does  not  like  the  idea 
of  a  completely  perfect  God's  planning  such 
a  world  as  experience  testifies  that  we  have. 
He  uses  an  illustration  that  reveals  the 
working  of  his  mind  on  this  subject: 

"Suppose  two  men  before  a  chess-board — 
the  one  a  novice,  the  other  an  expert  player 
of  the  game.  The  expert  intends  to  beat. 
But  he  cannot  foresee  exactly  what  any  one 
actual  move  of  his  adversary  may  be.  He 
knows,  however,  all  the  possible  moves  of 
the  latter;  and  he  knows  in  advance  how  to 
meet  each  of  them  by  a  move  of  his  own 
which  leads  in  the  direction  of  victory.  And 
the  victory  infallibly  arrives,  after  no  matter 
how  devious  a  course,  in  the  one  predestined 
form  of  checkmate  to  the  novice's  king." 
The  relation  of  God  to  the  other  factors  of 
the  universe  is  here  shown  by  analogy. 

It  seems  to  me  that  Mr.  Wells  has  made 
God  more  finite  than  he  need  be.  There  is 
not  quite  enough  invested  in  his  conception 
of  God  to  assure  us  that  the  Invisible  King 
may  not  get  the  worst  of  it  in  some  in- 
calculable development  of  the  ongoing 
world.  The  power  that  makes  for  righteous- 
ness is  hardly  big  enough  for  his  job.    And 


THE  GOD  OF  PRAYER      107 

Professor  James  would  not  have  involved 
himself  in  contradictions,  denied  the  testi- 
mony of  experience,  or  destroyed  his  own 
doctrines  had  he  given  God  the  basic  causal 
power  of  the  world  process.  The  fault  of  his 
philosophy  is  the  inadequacy  of  its  doctrine 
of  causes,  a  very  serious  fault  in  a  phi- 
losophy. Aside  from  this,  Professor  James 
shows  us  in  his  analogy  a  picture  of  the  God 
of  the  Bible.  His  analogy  reminds  one  very 
much  of  Jeremiah's  analogy  of  the  potter 
and  the  clay.  There  is  no  misunderstanding 
the  prophet's  application:  "At  what  instant 
I  shall  speak  concerning  a  nation,  and  con- 
cerning a  kingdom,  to  pluck  up,  and  to  pull 
down,  and  to  destroy  it;  if  that  nation, 
against  whom  I  have  pronounced,  turn  from 
their  evil,  I  will  repent  of  the  evil  that  I 
thought  to  do  unto  them.  And  at  what 
instant  I  shall  speak  concerning  a  nation, 
and  concerning  a  kingdom,  to  build  and  to 
plant  it;  if  it  do  evil  in  my  sight,  that  it 
obey  not  my  voice,  then  I  will  repent  of  the 
good,  wherewith  I  said  I  would  benefit 
them."  Here  the  divine  plan  of  action  is 
clearly  represented  as  contingent  upon  the 
action  of  human  factors  in  the  case. 


108     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

It  may  be  that  Professor  James  had  come 
more  nearly  to  the  bibhcal  viewpoint  of  God 
as  the  Creator  of  all  things  and  had  found  a 
way  to  relate  that  doctrine  to  his  other 
teachings  when  he  wrote,  in  1915,  The  Will 
to  Believe  and  Other  Essays,  His  doctrine  of 
a  finite  God  is  not  so  bald  and  blunt  in  these 
essays  as  in  his  Pluralistic  Universe^  pub- 
lished in  1912.  He  is  approaching  the  more 
normal  theistic  position  of  Bowne.  He 
might  make  himself  acceptable  to  the  ortho- 
dox theologian  if  he  had  not  written  the 
following  footnote  to  the  paragraph  in 
which  he  makes  application  of  the  above 
quoted  analogy.  He  is  showing  how  God 
may  hold  in  abeyance  certain  details  of  his 
plan  and  make  them  contingent  upon  hu- 
man acts,  which  are  generated  as  fresh  and 
new  contributions  to  the  cosmic  process  out 
of  the  inner  fountains  of  the  human  will. 
The  footnote  is  as  follows : 

"This,  of  course,  leaves  the  creative  mind 
subject  to  the  law  of  time.  And  to  anyone 
who  insists  on  the  timelessness  of  that  mind 
I  have  no  reply  to  make.  A  mind  to  whom 
all  time  is  simultaneously  present  must  see 
all  things  under  the  form  of  actuality  or 


THE  GOD  OF  PRAYER      109 

under  some  form  to  us  unknown.  If  he 
thinks  certain  moments  in  their  content 
while  future,  he  must  simultaneously  know 
how  the  ambiguity  will  have  been  decided 
when  they  are  past.  So  that  none  of  his 
mental  judgments  can  possibly  be  hypothet- 
ical, and  his  world  is  one  from  which  chance 
is  excluded.  Is  not,  however,  the  timeless 
mind  rather  a  gratuitous  fiction.^  And  is 
not  the  notion  of  eternity  being  given  at  a 
stroke  to  omniscience  only  just  another  way 
of  whacking  upon  us  the  block-universe  and 
of  denying  that  possibilities  exist? — just  the 
point  to  be  proved.  To  say  that  time  is  an 
illusory  appearance  is  only  a  roundabout 
manner  of  saying  there  is  no  real  plurality, 
and  that  the  frame  of  things  is  an  absolute 
unit.  Admit  plurality  and  time  may  be  its 
form."i 

This  passage  cannot  be  anything  else  than 
offensive  to  orthodox  theology,  for  the  time- 
less mind  of  the  Infinite  is  one  of  its  fondest 
possessions.  But  does  not  the  God  of  James 
come  nearer  squaring  with  life  and  with  the 
Bible  than  this  time-worn  notion  of  a  time- 


^  The  Will  to  Believe  and  Other  Essays,  p.  181.     Used  by 
permissioQ  of  Longmans,  Green  &  Co.,  publishers. 


110    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

less  mind,  which  sees  things  as  actual  rather 
than  in  the  order  of  antecedents  and  conse- 
quences, a  notion  not  taken  from  the  Bible 
or  experience  but  from  monistic  idealism? 
James  has  shunned,  probably  as  a  result  of 
the  influence  of  the  very  opinions  which  he 
abhors,  the  giving  of  sufficient  initial  crea- 
tive power  to  his  God  to  furnish  an  adequate 
ground  for  the  entire  cosmic  process;  but 
his  philosophy,  as  far  as  it  goes,  is  true  to  life 
and  experience  and  is  full  of  a  rugged  reli- 
gious vitality.  His  God  is  personal,  coming 
into  personal  relations  with  men.  He  has 
power  to  act  in  a  world  of  genuine  reality. 
He  offers  an  objective  for  religious  approach. 
One  does  not  have  the  feeling  that  this  God 
is  an  abstract  idea  or  a  set  of  subjective 
values.  The  influence  of  this  philosophy, 
wherever  it  is  spread  abroad,  will  be  to 
quicken  men  to  a  sense  of  religious  reality. 
Any  discovery  of  God  for  those  who  have 
lost  him  intellectually  must  be  made  by  way 
of  this  line  of  approach,  life  first  and  then 
philosophy.  The  day  of  dialectic  is  done. 
The  theology  of  the  future  must  be  built 
out  of  the  materials  of  life  and  experience. 


THE  GOD  OF  PRAYER      111 

The  Kind  of  God  the  World  Needs 

It  may  sound  like  a  priorism  to  discuss 
the  kind  of  God  that  the  rehgious  and  in- 
tellectual needs  of  mankind  will  demand, 
but  it  is  not.  These  have  been  discovered 
pragmatically.  Whether  there  is  a  God  who 
will  meet  the  demand  is  another  question. 
And  we  may  pragmatically  assume  that  the 
need  of  a  certain  type  of  God  has  an  eviden- 
tial bearing  upon  the  fact  of  his  existence. 
The  revelations  of  experience  are  the  keys 
to  deeper  reality.  Dr.  George  Galloway  has 
successfully  stated  the  matter  as  a  problem 
of  philosophy  and  shown  us  the  inevitable 
solution.    His  statement  is  as  follows: 

"Those  who  term  the  all-inclusive  unity 
of  experience  a  personal  Absolute  never 
succeed  in  reconciling  the  Absolute  Self 
with  the  multiplicity  of  finite  selves.  The 
form  of  Absolutism  which  reduces  all  reality 
to  a  single  individual  Being  is  confronted 
with  an  insoluble  difficulty;  either  the  Ab- 
solute Self  is  an  illusion,  or  finite  selves  are 
real  and  the  Absolute  Self  is  a  fiction.  This 
is  the  dilemma  of  Absolute  Idealism  to 
which  I  have  already  referred.  It  can  only 
be  avoided  by  abandoning  the  theory  that 


112     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

all  experience  falls  within  the  unity  of  the 
Absolute  Consciousness,  in  other  words,  by 
admitting  that  finite  selves  have  a  being  of 
their  own.  Hence  it  is  necessary  to  be 
clear  what  we  mean  by  saying  that  the 
Ultimate  Ground  unifies  the  elements  of 
experience.  The  Ground  must  unify  with- 
out thereby  becoming  identical  with  or  being 
absorbed  by  the  elements  unified.  This 
means  that  God  gives  unity  or  system  to  the 
plurality  of  spiritual  substances  or  experient 
centers,  though  he  is  not  himself  the  unity  in 
which  they  subsist.  But  he  is  the  Ground 
of  their  unity,  its  source  and  final  explana- 
tion. Pluralism,  it  should  be  noted,  on  this 
view  is  not  ultimate,  for  the  multiplicity  of 
finite  centers  all  depend  for  their  existence 
and  their  order  on  one  supreme  teleological 
will.  Finite  selves  and  the  mundane  system 
in  which  they  develop  are  all  sustained  by 
God,  who,  by  reason  of  his  transcendent 
character,  does  not  reduce  the  beings  who 
depend  on  him  to  a  phase  of  his  own  life. 
Pluralism  in  this  way  yields  to  a  derivative 
system  based  on  the  divine  activity,  which 
operates  through  all  its  parts.  A  Ground 
which  actually  conditions  experience  in  this 


THE  GOD  OF  PRAYER      113 

manner  may  be  truly  said  to  unify  it,  for  it 
brings  about  in  all  the  parts  a  reference  to 
one  source  and  a  direction  to  one  end.  But 
while  God,  the  Ultimate  Ground,  is  active 
within  the  system  of  the  world,  he  exists 
beyond  it.  He  is  transcendent  as  well  as 
immanent,  a  Self  and  yet  the  suflScient 
reason  of  the  society  of  selves."^ 

Evolutionary  Philosophy  Discovers  God 

A  study  of  the  world  in  which  we  live 
leads  ultimately  and  inevitably  to  a  realiza- 
tion of  the  need  of  God  to  fulfill  all  the  con- 
ditions observed  in  the  study.  There  is  no 
getting  away  from  it  unless  we  start  out,  like 
Haeckel,  with  the  determination  to  leave 
God  out  of  the  case.  Then  we  shall  probably 
wind  up  with  a  result  that  is  about  as  super- 
ficial and  ridiculous  as  his  Riddle  of  the 
Universe. 

A  splendid  contribution  to  modern  phi- 
losophy, a  study  of  the  world  from  the 
standpoint  of  life  and  experience,  is  the 
work  of  L.  T.  Hobhouse,  Development  and 
Purpose,  in  which  he  finds  the  cosmic  proc- 
ess to  be  a  development  of  mind.       It  is 

^Philosophy  of  Religion,  p.  434.     Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 


114    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

interesting  to  note  how  inevitably  he  reaches 
the  conclusion  of  the  reasonable  certainty 
of  a  Cosmic  Mind.  The  reader  does  not  need 
to  agree  with  all  his  minor  conclusions  con- 
cerning the  character  of  this  Cosmic  Mind 
to  profit  from  the  result  of  his  study.  He 
says  (p.  364) : 

"The  growth  of  harmony  involves  the 
evolution  of  individual  minds,  which  con- 
stantly enter  into  deeper  and  wider  relations 
with  one  another.  But  beyond  this  our 
account  appears  to  imply  a  permanent 
activity  of  a  Mind  that  is  not  limited  to  a 
single  physical  organism.  For  at  least  so  far 
as  our  experience  and  our  powers  of  concep- 
tion extend,  the  existence  of  a  purpose  im- 
plies a  Mind  commensurate  with  that  pur- 
pose. Mind  is  the  permanent — we  may 
venture  to  say  the  substantive — basis  of 
conception  or  activity.  Where  we  trace 
germs  or  filaments  of  purpose  we  infer  the 
rudiments  of  mind.  Where  a  purpose  of 
given  scope  is  plain  there  is  to  be  inferred  a 
mind  of  not  less  scope.  If,  as  we  now  con- 
clude, a  purpose  runs  through  the  world- 
whole,  there  is  a  Mind  of  which  the  world- 
purpose  is  the  object.    Such  a  mind  must 


THE  GOD  OF  PRAYER      115 

be  a  permanent  and  central  factor  in  the 
process  of  Reality,  but  how  in  detail  its 
relation  to  reality  in  general,  and  the  indi- 
vidual mind  in  particular,  is  to  be  con- 
ceived is  a  question  about  which  it  is  best 
to  frankly  confess  ignorance."^ 

The  last  statement  in  the  above  para- 
graph is  the  only  unwarranted  assumption. 
This  philosopher  is  shying  from  anything 
that  looks  like  religious  teaching  doubtless 
because  he  fears  that  a  leaning  toward  reli- 
gion will  hinder  the  acceptance  of  his 
philosophy  by  the  prejudiced  minds  of 
modern  thinkers.  Philosophy  is  a  realm  of 
strong  prejudices,  and  we  must  not  assume 
too  great  liberties  unless  we  are  seeking  to 
be  haled  out  of  court. 

The  Idea  of  God  Not  Outworn 

But  these  results  of  modern  thinking 
serve  to  show  that  the  idea  of  God  is  not  an 
outworn  idea.  There  is  a  rational  ground 
for  belief  in  God  that  can  never  be  removed. 
More  than  that,  there  is  an  overwhelming 
presumption  in  favor  of  God's  existence.   If 

1  Reprinted  by  permission  of  the  Maemillan  Co.,  from 
Development  and  Purpose,  by  L.  T.  Hobhouse. 


116    PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

the  modern  man  can  be  brought  to  realize 
these  facts,  he  will  have  a  basis  for  the  dis- 
coveries of  experience.  Theories  about  God 
and  the  experience  of  God  are  two  different 
things,  but  a  man  who  does  not  have  a  ra- 
tional ground  for  belief  in  God  will  not  go 
forward  with  the  experience.  He  must  have 
a  foothold  of  faith  for  the  beginning  of  a 
new  religious  experience.  If  the  modern  man 
is  to  be  turned  toward  religion  again  and  to 
prayer,  which  is  religion's  most  significant 
practice,  God  must  be  made  real  for  him. 
And  to  overcome  the  sort  of  objection  made 
by  Dr.  Overstreet  there  must  be  a  restate- 
ment of  the  conception,  or,  indeed,  a  new 
conception  must  be  found. 

The  God  of  the  Bible 

At  the  risk  of  being  regarded  as  naive  and 
simple-minded,  or  suspected  of  attempting 
to  be  facetious,  I  am  going  to  suggest  a  fair 
consideration  of  the  God  of  the  Bible.  He 
will  be  a  relief  from  theological  abstraction 
and  monistic  idealism.  He  will  furnish  in 
his  creative  capacity  a  ground  for  all  other 
existences.  He  is  a  person,  who  is  responsive 
to  the  seeking  heart  for  divine  fellowship. 


THE   GOD  OF  PRAYER      117 

He  has  recognized  humanity  as  a  real  cosmic 
factor.  He  is,  according  to  the  Christian 
interpretation,  which  is  the  final  conception 
of  the  Scriptures,  not  an  autocrat  but  a 
Father.  The  world  may  get  beyond  think- 
ing of  God  as  King,  because  it  has  ceased  to 
think  in  terms  of  kingship;  but  we  cannot 
conceivably  reach  a  condition  of  existence 
where  we  may  cease  to  think  in  terms  of 
fatherhood.  I  venture  to  predict  that,  after 
much  wandering  and  groping,  the  various 
living  schools  of  thought  will  ultimately 
unite  on  what  is  virtually  the  biblical  con- 
ception of  God. 

Personality 

Emphasis  has  been  laid  upon  the  personal 
idea  of  God.  A  word  as  to  the  meaning  of 
the  word  "person"  is  in  order  before  reach- 
ing the  conclusion  of  this  discussion.  The 
fact  of  the  matter  is  that  an  impersonal  God 
is  no  God  at  all.  There  are  minds  that  can 
conceive  of  a  fundamental  reality  that  is 
impersonal,  but  any  sort  of  fidelity  to  ac- 
curacy of  meanings  would  forbid  calling  it 
God.  Either  there  is  a  personal  God  or  there 
is  no  God  at  all.  Any  object  of  worship  that 


118     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

a  man  might  have  he  will  endow  with  per- 
sonality. When  he  can  no  longer  make  the 
endowment,  he  will  cease  the  worship.  The 
content  of  the  word  ''personal"  is  very  clear. 
It  does  not  of  necessity  include  bodily  form 
and  human  limitations.  In  fact,  to  the  ex- 
tent that  the  human  make-up  is  physical 
and  subject  to  mechanical  law,  to  that 
extent  it  falls  short  of  personality.  Only 
minds  are  personal.  The  personal  aspect  of 
mind  is  its  seK-consciousness  and  power  of 
seK-direction.  When  we  speak  of  the  per- 
sonality of  God,  we  mean  that  he  has 
conscious  intelligence  and  the  power  of  self- 
direction  according  to  principles  and  ideals. 

Prayer  Lifted  Into  Cosmic  Significance 

Now  we  are  ready  for  our  conclusions. 
Restore  God  and  you  restore  prayer.  Prim- 
itive man  would  pray  instinctively.  He  was 
unreflectively  credulous  and  superstitious. 
Modern  man  will  pray  instinctively  in  times 
of  emergency,  but  he  will  not  do  so  as  a 
matter  of  life  practice.  When  he  can  be  fur- 
nished a  be  ief  in  God  that  will  satisfy  both 
his  intellectual  demands  and  the  cravings 
of  his  soul,  he  will  turn  with  joy  to  the 


THE  GOD  OF  PRAYER      119 

worship  of  his  God  and  his  rehgious  interest 
will  be  supreme.  When  men  come  to  feel 
that  God  really  hears  prayer  and  gives  their 
petitions  any  sort  of  consideration,  they  will 
pray,  and  their  religion  will  take  on  meaning 
and  vitality. 

And  modern  science  and  the  new  phi- 
losophies of  experience  are  unquestionably 
leading  us  back  to  the  God  of  the  Bible. 
They  are  now  getting  hold  of  what  the 
prophets  and  poets  had  possession  of  long 
ago — the  world  in  which  we  live  is  itself  a 
living  world,  grounded  in  a  living  cause. 
Man  has  a  place  and  a  part  and  a  high 
destiny  in  this  universe.  He  has  kinship 
with  the  divine.  The  world  is  fundamentally 
a  world  of  personal  beings.  All  else  is 
subordinate  and  subservient.  God  relates 
his  purposes  and  activities  to  the  free  lives 
of  men.  He  is  not  forcing  a  harmony  of 
forces  and  wills  upon  the  universe,  but  is 
working  out  a  harmony  of  forces  and  wills 
which  will  have  at  its  consummation  a  moral 
foundation  and  which  will  constitute  the 
supreme  achievement  of  his  creative  will. 
Then,  if  this  is  a  personal  world,  if  God  is 
personal  and  we  are  personal,  if  he  relates 


120     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

his  purpose  to  ours,  if  we  are  partners  in  the 
cosmic  scheme,  our  prayers  do  count  for 
something.  Intercourse  with  God  is  Hfted 
into  a  cosmic  significance.  This  does  not 
mean  that  all  our  desires  shall  prevail,  but 
it  does  mean  that  they  have  consideration 
and  a  chance  for  realization. 


SELECTED  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Devotional  Books 

Why  Men  Pray,  Charles   L.  Slattery,   The 
Macmillan  Company. 

The    Meaning    of   Prayer,    H.    E.    Fosdick, 
Association  Press. 

Prayer  in  War  Time,  W.  Robertson  Nichol, 
Doran  Press. 

Old  Truths  and  New  Facts,  C.  E.  Jefferson, 
Revell. 

Psychology 

The    Psychology    of    Prayer,    Anna    Louise 
Strong,  University  of  Chicago  Press. 

The  Psychology  of  Religion,  George  A.  Coe, 
University  of  Chicago  Press. 

The  Psychology  of  Religious  Experience,  Ed- 
ward S.  Ames,  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

Varieties    of   Religious    Experience,    William 
James,  Longmans,  Green  &  Co. 

Religion 
Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Comparative  Re- 
ligion,  F.   B.   Jevons,   The    Macmillan    Com- 
pany. 

What  and  Where  is  God?  R.  L.  Swain,  The 
Macmillan  Company. 

121 


122     PHILOSOPHY  OF  PRAYER 

Public  Opinion  and  Theology,  Bishop  F.  J. 
McConnell,  Abingdon  Press. 

Social  Evolution  and  the  Development  of 
Religion,  C.  K.  Mahoney,  Methodist  Book 
Concern. 

Reason  in  Religion,  George  Santayana, 
Scribners. 

Philosophy 

Philosophy  of  Religion,  George  Galloway, 
Scribners. 

Metaphysics,  B.  P.  Bowne,  American 
Book  Co. 

Personalism,  B.  P.  Bowne,  Houghton 
Mifflin  Co. 

Theism,  B.  P.  Bowne,  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

A  Pluralistic  Universe,  William  James,  Long- 
mans, Green  &  Co. 

The  Will  to  Believe,  William  James,  Long- 
mans, Green  &  Co. 


c* 


'^ 


INDEX 


Absolute,  104 
Absolutism,  103 
Adaptation,  69 
Amen,  41 

Ames,  Edward  S.,  18 
Atheist's  view,  66 
Atonement,  37 

B 

Battlefield,  prayer  as,  68 
Bergson,  86 
Bible,  God  of  the,  116 
Bible  mysteries,  25 
Boreham,  F.  W.,  46 
Bowne,  Borden  P.,  79 
Buddhistic  mysticism,  43 


Carlyle,  Thomas,  43 
Catholic  mysticism,  43 
Causation,  mechanical,  83 
Causation,  organic,  86 
Causation,  teleological,  83 
Christian  Science,  101 
Coe,  Geo.  A.,  17 
Cosmic  Mind,  114 
Cosmic  significance  of  prayer, 

118 
Cromwell,  43 
Curtis,  O.  A.,  25 

D 

Definitions,  26 

Deism,  101 

Democratic  idea  of  God,  99 

Dependence,  64 

Desire,  29,  63 

Development    and    Purpose, 

115 
Devotional  literature,  13 
Dynamic,  prayer  as  a,  73 

E 

Effects,  subjective,  66 
Encyclopaedia  Britannica,  17 
Evolution  of  mind,  114 
Evolutionary  philosophy,  113 


Faith  generated,  71 
Fatherhood  of  God,  53 
Fear,  54 
Finite  God,  105 
Fitch,  A.  P.,  99 
Forgiveness,  63 
Fosdick,  H.  E.,  19 
Frazer,  39 


Galloway,  Prof.  George,  17 
God,  loss  of,  97 
God's  Morality,  64 
God  of  the  Bible.  116 

H 

Haeckel,  113 

Harmony,  114 

Harvey,  31 

Heaven,  56 

Historic  conceptions  of  God, 

101 
Hobhouse,  L.  T.,  114 
Humility,  64 

I 
Imperative,  categorical,  33 
Infinite,  104 
Introduction     Comparative 

Religion,  21 
Intuition,  46 


James,  William,  17,  107,  108 
Jefferson,  C.  E.,  93 
Jeremiah,  107 
Jevons,  20 

K 

Kant,  33 

Kingdom  of  heaven,  117 

Kingship  of  God,  117 


Labor,  religious,  73 

Law,  89 

Laws  of  prayer,  93 


123 


124 


INDEX 


Limitation,  law  of,  93 
Lord's  Prayer,  50 
Loss  of  God,  97 

M 

Magic,  38 
Marrett,  R.  R.,  17 
McConnell,  F.  J.,  64 
Meaning  of  Prayer,  19 
Mechanism,  83 
Meekness,  63 
Model  prayer,  50 
Modern  Philosophy,  113 
Mohammedanism,  17 
Monism,  103 
Morality,  61 
Mysticism,  42 


Reconciliation,  37 

Repetitions,  41 

Riddle  of  the  Universe,  113 


Sacrifice,  34 
Santayana,  66 
Sincerity,  67 
Slattery,  Chas.  L.,  28 
Social  appeal  of  prayer,  51 
Soliloquy,  66 
Subconscious  prayer,  31 
Subjective  eflFects,  66 
Surrender,  70 
Swain,  R.  L.,  97 


N 
Nature  of  magic,  38 
Naturalness  of  prayer,  18 
Needs,  material,  59 


Occidental  religious  attitude, 

60 
Oriental  religious  attitude,  60 
Organic  causation,  86 
Overstreet,  H.  A.,  99 


Paley,  101 

Pantheism,  101 

Pasteur,  32 

Personality,  117 

Personalism,  35 

Petition,  59 

Philosophy  of  Religion,  17 

Praise,  56 

Primitive  Culture,  27 

Problems.  80 

Psychology  of  Religion,  17 

Q 

Quest  for  God,  97 
Questions,  80 


Taylor,  Jeremy,  70 
Teleology,  83 
Tennyson,  43 

Theological  absolutism,  103 
Tylor,  26 

U 

Ultimate  Ground,  113 
Ultimate  in  Prayer,  50 
Unanswered  prayer,  27 
Unifying  of  personality,  67 
Union  with  Deity,  38 
Unseen,  the,  28 


Varieties  of  Religious  Expe- 
rience, 28 
Voltaire,  101 


W 

Wells,  H.  G.,  105 
Wesley,  43 
Whitman,  32 
Woman's  reason,  46 
Wordsworth,  43 
World  Ground,  81 
Worship,  57 


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